


That Clown Stripper Thing

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Art, Clown Strippers, Crack Treated Seriously, Crack and Angst, F/M, Happy Ending, Minor Marcus Cutter/Miranda Pryce, No Smut, Older Woman/Younger Man, clown stripper Hilbert, graduate student Hilbert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:41:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 23,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25350316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Alexander Hilbert would probably be the first person to admit that being part of a clown burlesque group is weird as fuck, but hey, he didn't get funding for graduate school and it helps pay the bills. But when he meets an attractive older woman at one of Naughty Clown Burlesque's performances, he finds himself wishing his occupation weren'tquiteso ridiculous... especially when her offer to help him study for his qualifying exams makes him realize that he wants more from their slowly blossoming friendship.Rosemary Epps knows better than to date a man almost a decade her junior, especially not one who is still in grad school... but that doesn't stop her from pitying him. Graduate school is tough enough even without worrying about how to live, and she's well-off enough to make her clown friend's life a little more comfortable. But as it becomes increasingly clear that he has more than a little bit of a crush on her, she realizes she needs to figure out her own feelings on the matter—and fast, before he makes a decision about his future that she's certain he'll regret.
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you want an actual Wolf 359 fic, go somewhere else. If you want a sex-comedy-ish romance novel-like thing with incidental Wolf 359 characters that was sparked by someone goading me into thinking about Alexander Hilbert as a clown-themed stripper and how The Terrible OC I Originally Made To Be Hilbert's Lab Manager would react, come right in.
> 
> The last chapter is an art gallery.

“Sorry, could you repeat that again? You hired a _what_ for your birthday?”

“A troupe of clown strippers,” Al said with a cheeky smile.

“A troupe of clown strippers,” Rosemary repeated, feeling rather as if she were losing her mind. “Al, _why_ did you hire a troupe of clown strippers for your birthday?”

“A man only turns 30 once,” he said, sounding up on his dignity. “Anyway, I thought it sounded like a once-in-a-lifetime sort of experience.”

“Because you see it once and you decide to gouge your own eyes out,” Rosemary muttered, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, isn’t stripping against the clown code?”

Al raised an eyebrow. “There’s a clown code?”

“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure it prohibits lewd acts. Like stripping.”

Al shrugged. “You know, I’m not sure you admitting that you know there’s a clown code actually gives you the conversational high ground you were hoping it would, Rosie.”

Rosemary let out an annoyed huff. “Al. Darling, sweet Al. You have the high ground in every other way. Can’t you at least give me this?”

Al clapped his hand down on her shoulder. “Not a chance,” he said, mock-serious. And then he ruined the effect by laughing. “Come on, Rosie, you’ll have a good time. You always do like to gawk at a spectacle.”

“A lady does not gawk,” she said primly.

“Good thing you’re not a lady, then. See you Saturday?”

“Only so I can make you regret ever coming up with such a silly idea!”

Al laughed again and turned to go, waving an acknowledgement over his shoulder. “Just you try!” he called back at her as he headed down the hall back to his office.

Rosemary sighed.

Well. Wasn’t this going to be _special_.

Saturday night finally arrived, and in the end, the troupe of clown strippers turned out to be one part acrobatics display, one part burlesque act, and one part striptease, all wrapped up in corsetry, facepaint, and glitter. Rosemary had to give them this: they all seemed very intent on doing the best job possible, even if the job they were doing was fundamentally ridiculous.

Once their performance was over, the troupe spread out among the other people in the event room turned dance hall that Al had rented out from a hotel for his party, flirting and teasing their way through Al’s friends. It was only when she caught sight of one of them giving Marcus a lap dance that she got an idea. A horrible, awful idea that would necessitate an immediate trip to the ATM down in the lobby. A horrible, awful idea that would _definitely_ give her plenty of blackmail material for the next time Al decided to do something else ridiculous.

Rosemary couldn’t help but grin at the thought of it.

Alexander leaned against the wall and shut his eyes. He felt a little bit dizzy, but that was only to be expected; he had not eaten a proper dinner, and, as one of the lighter members of the troupe, he was one of the people who got lifted and tossed about. Well, at least this job came with food. There was a massive buffet table laid out with hors d’oeuvres and cake and bottles of… well, he was not certain what they were bottles of. Something alcoholic, most likely.

He opened his eyes again and scanned the room, making certain that no one needed his attention or his help with anything before he went after that buffet. And then he froze.

A woman was approaching, short and fat, in a dress that shone bright gold against her brown skin and left very little to the imagination. Something about her walk made him think she was the domineering sort, the type of woman who so often approached him because he looked easy to overpower, and Alexander braced himself for some unwelcome attention. And she did step in very close to him, close enough that he could smell her perfume—something warm and citrusy—but she stopped there, her hands well away from him, leaving enough space that he could escape if he wanted to.

And then she grinned up at him, and all of his breath left him in a rush, such was the power of her smile.

“Mind if I manhandle you a bit?” she asked, tilting her head to one side as she looked up at him.

Alexander frowned. That was not what he had expected at all. “What?”

“I want to keep Al off his guard until I spring the trap, and it’s easier if it looks like I’m drunk and handsy,” she said, flashing that grin at him again.

He nodded cautiously. “I suppose. What do you want?”

The woman reached into the little purse she had slung over one shoulder and pulled out a bill, then reached across him with her other hand and grabbed one of his suspenders, tugging it away from his body. She lifted the bill to his eye level, and Alexander struggled to focus on it for a moment.

It sprang into clarity. A twenty. 

“Do you do lap dances?” the woman asked.

Alexander nodded. Not often, but he had the same training the others had.

The woman laughed. “Excellent.” She tucked the twenty into his other suspender. “I want you to go give the birthday boy a lap dance in about, oh… fifteen minutes?”

Alexander frowned at her again. Once again, not what he had expected. “The birthday boy? Not you?”

The woman nodded. “Al thought it was a good idea to fill a dance hall with all of his friends and a troupe of horny clowns, and I am _never_ going to let him forget it.”

Alexander snatched the twenty out of his suspenders and tucked it into his pocket. “Double the price if you want to take a lot of pictures,” he said, strangely emboldened by this woman’s straightforward manner.

She laughed again, low and raspy. “I do like a man who knows his own worth. Fine, then. If I get some good shots, I’ll even triple it,” she said, releasing his suspender. She flashed him another grin, and then whirled around and was gone, weaving her way through the crowd towards another member of his troupe.

He watched her go, bemused. And then, he turned his focus to the buffet. He was certain he could get a dozen or so of those hor d’oeuvres into himself before it was time to go give that lap dance.


	2. Chapter 2

Rosemary was inordinately proud of herself as she watched every single clown in the troupe, one by one, hunt Al down and give him a lap dance.

Of course, she might have miscalculated slightly. The damn man seemed to be enjoying himself. Particularly with that skinny little bald scrap of a man who had shown enough cheek to ask her to double her price. But he did his job well, and she got some truly excellent shots out of his performance. Rosemary slid the clown another two twenties without compunction when he finished his dance and sidled up to her for his payment.

And even if Al _was_ enjoying himself now, she rather hoped that in another year or two he would look back on this night with complete and utter mortification. And there she would be, with the photos to prove it had really happened, ready to remind Al about this night for the rest of their lives.

As the evening went on, people slowly trickled their way out, off to beds that were far more welcoming far sooner in the evening than they had been in everyone’s twenties. To Rosemary’s surprise, more than a few of the clowns seemed to be sticking around, including that skinny little fellow who had extorted her.

Then, suddenly, the room seemed to empty of clowns all at once… along with the birthday boy. That seemed to be the cue for everyone else to leave, and Rosemary found herself alone in the event hall without having planned to be the last one left.

There was a sudden movement over near the coat closet. Ah, not entirely alone. The skinny little fellow was emerging, a thin jacket covering his previously-bare chest and a shoulder bag slung over top of it. He looked around the room with a frown.

“Something wrong?” Rosemary asked.

“Have you seen… ah.” He frowned, and held his hand up to about four inches above his own head. “Black and white paint, beard, this tall?”

Rosemary shook her head. “He probably went upstairs to Al’s suite with the others.”

The frown grew deeper, distorting his painted-on smile. “Up to Al’s suite? Why?”

Rosemary shrugged. “Not sure. If I had to guess? Al decided he wanted a clown orgy to finish off his birthday.”

The man gaped at her, clearly aghast. “We are not supposed to sleep with clients.”

Rosemary gave him a pitying look. “Yeah, sorry about that. Al tends to have that effect on people.”

“What effect on people?”

“He makes them forget the reasons they shouldn’t have sex with him.” She let out a wry little laugh. “I should know. I’ve been caught by his charms more than once, and I know better. Your coworkers didn’t stand a chance.” Fortunately, she seemed to have finally trained herself out of responding to that sort of thing, and Al seemed to have learned his lesson well enough not to ask her.

And thank goodness for that, because otherwise she might be in the middle of a clown orgy right now.

Alexander glared at the woman in the gold dress, though he knew she did not deserve it. She was not responsible for his ride abandoning him for an orgy. If she was not joking about the orgy, that was. 

She had not sounded as if she was joking. 

“Do you know how long they will be?”

The woman sighed and rolled her eyes. “Half the night, I should imagine. Al’s got stamina.”

Alexander frowned. He had not thought to bring any of the papers he was planning to review this weekend with him, assuming that, as usual, Viktor would want to leave the minute the event they were performing at was over. And his phone had been running on fumes by the time they had gotten to the venue; by now, it was completely dead.

“You want some of this cake?” the woman asked, heading over to the well-picked-over buffet table.

He considered it. Well, it was not as if he was going anywhere until Viktor got done with whatever it was he was doing upstairs, and it would be nice to have company. He joined her at the table and took the massive slab of marble cake she offered him. It was thick with frosting in about six different colors and smelled… well, it smelled like diabetes waiting to happen, but right now he could use the carbs. Performing always took a lot out of him.

The woman hewed another massive slice of cake off for herself, and he followed her over to one of the round tables set up in the event space, sitting down next to her. For a little while, they ate in silence, until she broke it with a sly sideways look and a contemplative question.

“So… is this your day job?”

Alexander snorted. “Not exactly.”

“What do you do?” she asked.

Alexander hesitated. He did not know this woman, and was reluctant to give her too many identifying details.

“I’m in biochem research, myself,” she said, taking another bite of cake. “Pays the bills pretty well, or at least well enough to bribe a bunch of clown strippers into helping me blackmail Al. Not that it’ll work,” she added contemplatively. “That man has _no_ shame.”

Alexander snorted again. Well, it was not as if he was going to ever run into her again. “I am in graduate school,” he offered. “Microbiology. Retroviruses, mainly.”

Her eyebrows shot up her forehead in surprise. “Really?” The eyebrows lowered again into a frown. “And you’re having to do _this_ to make ends meet?”

“I did not get funding,” he muttered into his next bite of cake, glad that his face paint probably hid the hot blush he felt spread across his cheeks.

“Oh, poor dear.” The woman gave him a sympathetic look. “It’s awfully expensive, isn’t it?”

Alexander nodded and took another hasty bite of cake.

“I was lucky,” she said with a sigh, poking listlessly at her slab of cake. “Fully funded and parents willing to lighten the load a bit.” She turned back towards him, her gaze sharp. “Do you have an Onlyfans?”

Alexander blinked, confused by the sudden change in topic. “Yes?”

“What is it?”

He hesitated, uncertain. He was not used to clients or their friends asking so many questions of him. But so far, this woman had seemed both careful of his consent and remarkably willing to throw her money around, and if she was interested... well, it would be nice to afford meals other than ramen or rice and beans, and his bare face was not visible in any of the photos or videos he had there. “ScienceFoolery.”

She reached into her little purse and pulled out a cell phone. A quick search later and he could see that she had found it. “Goodness. Is it all clown themed?”

“I already have the paints for work. It is easy way to obscure face,” he muttered, feeling self-conscious.

“I can’t blame you for that, I suppose.” She turned her phone off. “Could I call you a cab?”

He stared blankly at her, startled by the offer. “I should wait for—“

“—your friend, you said. But you’re in grad school, darling. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than keeping my sad old self company. Like packing up half the leftovers on the buffet table and heading home to get some work done and find your phone charger.”

She was right, of course, but he was still shocked that she had read his situation so clearly. “How did you know my phone was out of battery?”

“I figure you would have either called your friend by now or called a cab for yourself if it were working. So it was either that or broken phone,” she said, a kind smile on her face. “Come on. I know where the catering crew stashed all the aluminum trays everything came in on. Let’s get you fed and _home_.”

Twenty minutes later and Alexander was in a cab, a pair of filled aluminum trays in his lap that would probably give him lunches and dinners for the better part of a week, if they didn’t spoil before then. The woman in the gold dress was leaning in the window of the cab and laughing over something with the driver, whose eyes were locked on the woman’s cleavage. Well, Alexander could not blame the driver; he only rarely found women attractive himself, and even he found this woman difficult to look away from.

And then, with one final laugh and a wave at Alexander, she pulled back out the window and he was on his way home. It was only when he got there that he discovered that she had already paid for his ride.

What a peculiar woman.

For all that he knew he would most likely never see her again, he almost wished he had gotten her name.


	3. Chapter 3

Al came to find Rosemary in her lab on Monday. “Rosie, my darlin,” he drawled, a big grin on his face. “Tell me. Was the clown stripper party worth it?”

Rosemary rolled her eyes. “Well, it certainly gave me enough blackmail material to keep you on your toes for the next decade or so.”

Al let out a great guffaw of laughter at that. “I did notice you taking an awful lot of pictures. Can I see?”

“Sure.” Rosemary dug her phone out of her pocket and unlocked it before handing it over. “But I’ll have you know that I’ve backed those up to three secure locations and the cloud, just in case you get any smart ideas about deleting them.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Al muttered, obviously engrossed. “Though if you’d email me a copy of some of these...”

“ _Al._ ”

“What?” He looked up, a little smirk on his face. “A man does like to keep track of his conquests.”

“Do you even know any of their names?”

“Sure,” he said, turning the phone to show her a photo of a heavyset male clown leaning over Al, his hand on Al’s shoulder. “This one’s Boffo, and he’s a power bottom.”

Rosemary let out an irritated huff. “Their real names, Al.”

“Nah,” he said, turning his attention back to her phone. “Never going to see most of them again anyway. Why bother?” But before Rosemary could respond, he let out a low whistle. “Hello, hello. You sure did take a lot of pictures of this fellow.”

“What fellow?” Rosemary asked, trying to sound nonchalant. She knew, of course—it had to be that young man she’d spent the end of the evening talking with before she had stuck him in a taxi so that he could get home to study— but she didn’t want Al to think that one of the clowns had actually caught her eye.

“The bald one.”

Rosemary raised her eyebrows significantly. “There were several, darling. I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

Al shot her a dubious look, but turned the phone around anyway. He had paused on one of the nicer shots, the skinny little clown looking almost impossibly dainty as he straddled Al’s lap and beautiful with it, for all that his costume should have rendered the entire thing ridiculous.

“Oh, _him_ ,” Rosemary said, dismissing the phone with a wave and hoping her blush wasn’t visible. “He _haggled_ with me. I just wanted to get my money’s worth.”

“Uh-huh.” Al looked her over and then back down at the phone screen, his eyebrows raised dubiously. “If he weren’t so damn skinny I’d say he’s just your size.”

“ _Al._ Please. I have better taste than that, unlike _some_ people.”

“Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

“I’d snap that poor man like a twig, even if he weren’t a clown stripper.” Rosemary snatched her phone back. “Get out of here. I’ve got work to do.”

Al laughed and let her shoo him out of her lab, delivering a “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” as a parting shot.

Rosemary rolled her eyes, went back to work, and forgot about the entire thing. Would have put the entire thing aside entirely, if she hadn’t opened her phone at the end of the day to check her notifications after work only for it to open on to that photo of Al and the clown, still pulled up on her photos app.

She studied the photo with a frown. That poor boy was too skinny. Bad enough to be working a ridiculous job that had to keep him out at all hours in order to make ends meet during grad school, but it didn’t look like he was making enough to feed himself.

Well. She _had_ asked for his OnlyFans account, had even subscribed to it. Easy enough to just send him some money that way, and it wasn’t as if she didn’t have the spare cash floating around. She snagged her laptop off her bedside table and pulled up his account and tried not to look _too_ closely at some of the photos he had posted there. There was something about actually having had a conversation with the man that left her reluctant to know what he looked like naked.

Not that she wouldn’t have taken a peek if he had been a complete stranger, but talking with him had made him into a person instead of a pretty object, and now she absolutely refused to treat him like one.

Well, all right. Maybe just one peek.

Alexander stared at the notifications. A string of purchases, followed up with a hundred dollar tip. He did the mental math; two weeks of groceries if he let himself splurge a bit, three if he was careful. The thought left him lightheaded.

He frowned at the username. R0513. Not one of his regulars, not that any of his regulars were well-off enough to tip a hundred dollars at once. It had to be that woman. From the party, in the gold dress.

There was no note with the tip. 

He did not know what to make of it.

He tried not to think about it as the week wore on. There were no more purchases from this R0513, but that tip nagged at him, made him wonder if she was expecting something from him. Finally, by Friday evening, he had run out of work to distract himself with and could not stand it any more. He sent her a private message.

**_Thank you for the tip. Do you want me to take some more pictures for you?_**

He had looked over what she had ended up purchasing. Mostly the more tasteful of the photos; nudes from behind, with his face in profile, that ridiculous clown nose disrupting the lines of his face. She had purchased one video, but it had only been of him playing around in a friend’s studio, trying to learn how to pole dance, and was more a demonstration of mediocrity than anything titillating. 

R0513 did not write back that night, but the next night, after a performance his troupe had done in a burlesque venue, he opened his phone to find a message from her.

**_Just get yourself some decent groceries. You’re way too skinny._ **

Alexander snorted. Definitely that woman from the party. He tapped a quick message back. **_You sound like my sister._**

**_And you should listen to her! I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be able to count your ribs like that._ **

“Something funny?” Viktor asked, appearing at Alexander’s shoulder.

He shook his head, wiping away the smile that had made its way onto his face. “No, simply a strange message.”

“Not that creepy man who wanted you to send him pictures of your feet again, was it?”

“No.”

“What ever happened with that, anyway?” Viktor asked, throwing on a shirt.

“He was disappointed that the shoes are mostly padding, from what I recall.” Alexander frowned. “And do not talk to me like we are friends. You abandoned me last week and I am still angry with you.”

Viktor grinned apologetically. “I am sorry.”

“You did not even tell me before you went!”

“I assumed you would be joining us.”

“In an orgy?”

Viktor considered this for a moment. “Perhaps not. You do take a while to warm up to people.”

“So it really _was_ an orgy?”

“I refuse to comment further,” Viktor said, finally digging his jacket out of the pile on the table. “Are you ready to go?”

“I cannot believe that you took part in an orgy. With our _coworkers_ ,” Alexander said as he followed Viktor out of the venue. “How can you look any of them in the eye?”

“Sasha, we strip for a living. We have already seen each other naked. And you cannot tell me you are completely unaware of the social dynamics.”

“Social dynamics” was Viktor’s polite euphemism for the relationship drama that occasionally wrecked havoc on the cohesion of their little troupe. “I would think that such things would make you hesitant to add more entanglements to the mix. And with a client!”

“And several of his friends,” Viktor added.

“That does not make it better, Viktor!”

Viktor shrugged. “I was curious. The man is six-foot-eight.”

All right, so perhaps Alexander could understand that curiosity. “And?”

“And he was… proportional,” Viktor said with an upward thrust of his hand, making it clear he was talking about the man’s dick.

Alexander winced. “Didn’t that _hurt_?”

Viktor only shrugged.


	4. Chapter 4

Rosemary was alone and bored on a Sunday evening, and that was always a recipe for disaster. She flipped her way idly through recommended shows on all three of the streaming services she subscribed to, scrolled her way through her social media accounts, and finally did what she had been putting off all afternoon and opened up OnlyFans.

There was a new message from ScienceFoolery.

**_Thank you for the grocery money. I splurged on frozen vegetables._ **

Rosemary bit the inside of her top lip, trying to suppress a smile, and typed a quick message back. **_Frozen vegetables aren’t a real meal!_**

He must have been online. She got a response almost immediately. **_But they are a nice change from rice and beans._**

Rosemary bit down harder on her lip for a moment, and then, before she could think better of it, pulled up the option to send a tip via private message and sent him forty bucks. **_Buy some protein. On me._**

It was a few minutes before he responded. **_What do you want in exchange?_**

Rosemary stared at her phone screen with a frown. What _did_ she want from him? Just attention, she supposed, though why she was trying to get it from him rather than hunting down one of her friends…

Friends with families and houses and white picket fences. Hell, even Marcus and Miranda had seemed to settle in to something resembling a stable relationship over the past few years, though both of them had their little intrigues on the side. Her only single friend was Al, and the mood she was in tonight she’d end up sleeping with him just to break up the tedium.

 ** _Have dinner with me,_** she typed back.

**_What?_ **

**_Buy yourself something nice for dinner. Or something cheap and plentiful. And eat dinner with me._ **

**_How?_ **

**_Video chat. Or voice chat, if you’d prefer._ **

There was another long pause before his response. **_Give me half an hour. How do you prefer to video chat?_**

She sent him the Gmail address she used to sign up for sites she didn’t want sending spam to her main account and waited.

Alexander put in an order for an absolutely ridiculous amount of cheap Chinese food at the restaurant down the street and made his way over there to pick it up. He still was not certain about whether he wished to video chat with this woman, but he was bored out of his mind with studying for his qualifying exams and needed a distraction, and he thought she might be as good of one as any. But he _did_ need to eat dinner. And his roommate was out of the apartment for the evening; Isabel had some kind of hot date and had told him not to wait up.

He was running a few minutes past the half hour he had told her when he finally made it back to his apartment, but he took another five to apply a swift face of makeup before opening up Hangouts. The address she had given him was online, and when he hit the video call button she answered in an instant, that startling smile of hers spreading across her face and stealing his breath the same way it had the last time she had used it on him.

“I didn’t think you were going to call.”

Alexander popped open a container of garlic beef. “Apologies. I needed to, well…” he gestured to his face.

“Apply the disguise? Understandable.” There wasn’t much visible of the room behind her—he could see cabinets, which made him think that she was in her kitchen—but what he could see looked much nicer than his beat-up old apartment. “Anything exciting for dinner?”

“Chinese food.” He popped open another container. “Garlic beef, lo mein, spring rolls and crab rangoon.”

She beamed at him. “Sounds delicious. I went for Thai myself. Yellow curry.”

He smiled hesitantly back, but had no idea how to answer.

“Let’s eat,” she said, toasting him with her fork.

They ate in a silence that ate at Alexander in turn. It was less lonely and sad a meal than the bowl of ramen and frozen vegetables that he would most likely have had for dinner if he had been left to his own devices, but it was still strange, a situation he had no idea how to navigate, and he considered it as he finished off the crab rangoon.

“Why did you want to eat dinner with me?” he asked, breaking the silence.

The woman swallowed swiftly and snatched up a napkin, dabbing at the corners of her mouth. “I was bored. And lonely.”

“I cannot imagine that I am any better than being alone.”

She laughed. “Well, I’ve never had dinner with a clown, so this is a novel experience, at least.” She fiddled with her fork and bit her lower lip, looking as if she were contemplating something. “Is there anything you _want_ to talk about?”

Alexander considered. Well, she _had_ said that she had gone to graduate school herself. Perhaps she would understand. “I am studying for my qualifying exams. Hopefully I will do well enough to get in to a funded program next year.”

Rosemary made a face. “Oh, quals are dreadful, aren’t they? So much pressure.”

“And I…” He sighed and leaned his chin in his hand. “I do not study well. I prefer research.”

“Poor boy.” She tilted her head to one side and studied him. “Want me to quiz you?”

“Quiz me?”

“To help you study.”

He frowned. “Do you know much about my field?”

“Not retroviruses specifically, but my degree _was_ in micro.”

He blinked at her, startled. “Really?”

She nodded. “It’s not what I’m currently doing, but I’m not _that_ out of date.”

“I…” He was more confused by this woman than ever. “I would appreciate that.”

She beamed at him again. “Wonderful.”


	5. Chapter 5

Rosemary hadn’t meant for it to become a habit, but a month later and she found she was spending most of her evenings chatting with ScienceFoolery both with video—on the nights he felt up to the makeup—and without. She quizzed him on micro concepts and discussed the contents of the most recent papers he had read and above and beyond that, helped him with drafts of the paper he was currently in the middle of co-writing with one of his professors. He was obviously intelligent and quick to pick up on things and all in all, far too good to be in a program that wasn’t funding him.

It worried her, a little bit. He so obviously deserved better.

Though perhaps what should really worry her that she was worrying even a little bit over a man whose face she hadn’t ever seen properly and whose name she didn’t even know.

A knock on her lab door startled her out of her reverie, and a moment later Al poked his head in. “Rosie, my darlin’. You coming to happy hour tonight?”

“I don’t know.” She hadn’t gone the past couple of weeks, and hadn’t really missed it. “Should I?”

“Might be amusing. I think Marcus’s new side piece is one of the clowns from my party.”

Rosemary felt her cheeks flush, though she really had no reason to be embarrassed. Helping a clown study for his quals was an entirely different thing from fucking one. Never mind the fact that she had continued to purchase some of his photos from time to time, just as an excuse to tip him extra for groceries. She didn’t think that he would have accepted the money if she didn’t use her purchases to justify them, and it had been nice to see that his ribs weren’t quite as visible in some of the nudes he’d posted recently. “I might pop in for a bit.”

Al eyed her. “So you going to tell me who you’re seeing?”

Rosemary snorted. “Like I have the time to date, Al.”

“So who are you fucking, then?”

“ _Al._ ”

“You’re not usually one to get out of here before seven, Rosie. But you’ve been working a proper nine-to-five the last few weeks,” Al said in that bland conversational way he had about him when he was settling in to interrogate someone. “So is it someone I know, or…?”

“I…” Rosemary tried to figure out what to say. “I’ve been mentoring a grad student.”

Al’s eyebrows shot up his forehead in surprise. “Mentoring.”

“A grad student. Yes.”

He frowned. “This a new work initiative, or…?”

She shook her head and prepared to lie, for all that it most likely wouldn’t do any good. Al always could see right through her. “A friend from grad school is teaching now, had a student she thought I’d get on well with, that’s all.” She smiled blandly at Al. “He wanted to talk to someone working in corporate research, and it turns out he needed some help studying for his quals, so I’ve been quizzing him.”

Al gave her a suspicious look, but seemed willing enough to accept this story at face value, at least for now. “Yeah, well, he can study on his own tonight. I feel like I haven’t see you in weeks,” he grumbled.

“Aw, Al. Are you saying you miss me?”

“Nothing of the sort,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It’s just been boring at happy hour without you, all right?”

“Well, I’ll come tonight.” ScienceFoolery had said he was working, anyway, and if he wanted to talk to her it wouldn’t be until late that night. Which probably meant that if Marcus actually _was_ dating one of the clowns, whoever it was wouldn’t be present that night. “You can’t be left to skewer the foibles of our coworkers all alone, after all.”

Al grinned at her like a schoolboy. “Thanks, Rosie.”

“Are you working tonight, or is this for another little session with your sugar daddy?” Isabel asked, poking her head into the bathroom.

Alexander paused in the middle of filling in the diamond around his left eye to glare at Isabel’s reflection. “She is a woman, Isabel. I am fairly certain that is not the correct term.”

“Sugar mommy, then,” Isabel said with a shrug. “Though from everything you’ve told me about the woman, I’m pretty sure she’s got a ‘Your daughter calls me daddy too’ t-shirt in her wardrobe somewhere.”

Alexander almost choked. She did. He had seen it, one evening when he had been working late and had messaged her afterwards just in case she was still awake and willing to help him parse the contents of a paper he had read earlier that day. She had been happy to, had answered his video call obviously dressed for bed, her curls wrapped away in a silken bonnet and an oversized t-shirt with that phrase draping her body. When he had asked about it, she had laughed and said that it had been a birthday gift from Al.

“She is… unique,” he said, trying to sound disinterested. “I think you might like her, actually.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll like anyone who makes it easier for you to make rent, daddy or no,” Isabel said. “But you let me know if she does anything creepy, okay? I’ll hunt her down and break her kneecaps.”

Alexander waved Isabel’s concerns off and went back to filling in the diamond. “Of course. Though I do not even know her real name, Isabel. That might make hunting her down difficult.”

Isabel dismissed this with a shrug. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question,” Isabel said. “You going to be around tonight?”

“Why are you asking?” Alexander moved on to the other eye, outlining the diamond that would surround it with a precision that was second nature to him now.

To his surprise Isabel blushed, her cheeks visibly darkening under the harsh bathroom light. “Well, uh… Things have been going really well with Renée. And I kind of invited her over to eat dinner and spend the night, so I just want to know how much clown activity to expect in the apartment tonight.”

Alexander snorted. “None at all, after I am gone. I will make certain to wash this off at the venue, if it makes you feel better.”

“Viktor won’t mind waiting? I know he gets impatient sometimes.”

“Viktor still owes me for abandoning me to go to an orgy,” Alexander muttered. “He can wait five minutes for me to get my face paint off.”

Isabel grinned. “Thanks. I really appreciate, y’know, not having to explain why there’s a clown in my living room to the girl I’ve got the hots for.” She paused and seemed to be considering something. “I wonder if we could make money off of that somehow.” She held her hands up as if displaying a marquee. “Close Encounters of the Clown Kind.”

Alexander snorted. “Let me know if you work out how to. Would be happy to do my part.”

“Sure thing. And, uh, break a leg tonight, I guess?”

“As long as I do not literally,” Alexander muttered, examining his reflection carefully before picking up the bottle of fixative. “I cannot afford medical emergency.”

“Who can?” Isabel asked flippantly before leaving Alexander alone to finish his preparations.

To Alexander’s surprise, Viktor was more than willing to give him the time to get the face paint washed off. In fact, Viktor joined him, scrubbing his own paint off with baby wipes before sluicing the rest off in the sink of the venue’s single-user bathroom, side by side with Alexander.

“Are you going somewhere after this?” Alexander asked as they stripped the face paint away.

Viktor nodded. “Once I drop you off I will be going to bar. To meet my, ah...” he seemed to pause and consider, his hand hovering over his face as he looked for words. “Lover?” he tried, and then made a face. “No, that is all wrong. I have sex with him and he and his partner buy me drinks,” Viktor said with a shrug before starting in on his face again.

That sounded, well, not like Viktor at all. “But you are being safe?”

He snorted. “Safe enough, provided I do not let feelings get involved. I get the impression that I am just a toy the two of them are playing with.” He finished wiping away the last of the white base coat on his face and made an attempt to get some of the black out of his short, dense beard before giving up with a sigh. “It is fun playing, at least.” He gave Alexander a wan smile. “And what is being young for, if not to play?”

Alexander had no answer to that, other than to wonder if R0513 was playing with him in some way... or if he gave her the opportunity, whether she would want to play with him the way Viktor was playing with this man he was seeing.


	6. Chapter 6

Rosemary tilted her head to one side and examined the heavyset man who had just joined Marcus and Miranda at the bar. He had a dense, dark beard that obscured the lower half of his face, but Rosemary thought he was younger than that beard made him look. Almost as young as the fellow she’d been spending her evenings talking with. And definitely familiar.

She pulled up the photo from Al’s birthday on her phone to make sure, and glanced back and forth between the two for a minute. Add the face paint, darken that beard to solid black, and…

“You know, Al, I think you’re right. I’m pretty sure that’s Boffo.”

Al grinned. “Thought he might be, but it’s good to get a second opinion. The poor fellow turned bright red and stared at my crotch when I introduced myself the other week.”

Rosemary took another sip of her cheap whiskey and winced. “I do wonder how they get on with it, though.”

“Oh?”

“Well, I always assumed Marcus was pretty firmly on the receiving end himself.”

“Hm.” Al studied the little group at the bar himself, tilting his head to one side contemplatively. “Maybe he brings in Miranda to help Boffo make a sandwich out of him.”

“You think? She doesn’t seem like the sort to collaborate. Not in the bedroom, at least.”

Al only shrugged.

“Anyway, you said you introduced yourself. So what’s poor Boffo’s real name, then?”

“Viktor Stukov.”

“Viktor? How old-fashioned. And Stukov... Russian?” ScienceFoolery had a Russian accent. Very faint, but sometimes he dropped his articles. She wondered if they were connected in some way outside of the troupe.

“Of Slavic extraction, at least.” Al’s voice sounded bland and bored, not at all like he usually did when picking over a piece of gossip with her.

Rosemary gave her friend a concerned look. “Al? Something wrong?”

He shook his head. “Nah.”

“So it’s not weird finding out that fellow’s real name?”

Al laughed at that, and Rosemary almost thought it was a real laugh. “Nah. I guess...” he sighed. “I guess I don’t miss having someone to skewer people with as much as I thought I did.”

“All right. We don’t have to talk about this, you know.” Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her work pants, and she ignored it.

But Al shook his head and gave her a wan little half-smile. “How about you run along home and see if that grad student of yours needs some more tutoring.” And then he straightened his shoulders and looked over at the bar, his smile brightening up into one that might actually be real. “I’m going to go see if I can turn Boffo into a beetroot again.”

Rosemary laughed. “Dreadful man. At least let me come along and meet him properly.”

“Yeah, sure thing.”

Boffo-actually-Viktor _did_ turn bright red when Al slid up to his side at the bar. And then Al stepped to the side and introduced Rosemary, and Viktor’s eyes went very wide and all of the color drained out of his face. She suddenly realized that ScienceFoolery must have told Viktor enough about her for the man to identify her on sight.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad one, she had no idea.

Alexander’s phone buzzed, and he snatched it up, hoping for a message from R0513. He had been home for half an hour, long enough to meet Isabel’s hot date and for them to invite him to join them in the living room where they were watching a movie, which he did for just long enough to decide his presence there was both unnecessary and unwanted, not that either woman would have told him so. So he had excused himself to go study and had retreated to his room and had, out of what was now habit, sent R0513 a message to let her know he was home and could use a second opinion on something he had read.

But the buzz had not been a message from R0513. It had been a text from Viktor. Several texts from Viktor.

 ** _Your sugar daddy is here_** , the first one said, followed by a blurry photo from a low angle—clearly a shot Viktor had tried to take surreptitiously—that was almost certainly the woman that Alexander had spent the past month talking to almost every night. And if there had been any question about her identity, most of the rest of the picture was taken up with the massive frame of what had to be the man who had hired them for his birthday party, though what little of his face was visible was far away and foreshortened.

**_here with that giant from the bday party  
_ ** **_her name is Rosemary_ **

Alexander was not entirely certain that he had wanted to know the woman’s real name, but Viktor had given him no chance to object.

One final text came in as Alexander was studying the photo. A link to a LinkedIn page, one he could only assume was hers.

Did he want to know more? Knowing even her first name already felt like too much when she had not offered it herself. It felt strangely invasive, even as it left him feeling indignant about the fact that they had been talking so often for the past month and she had not introduced herself properly that entire time. Were they not friends?

No, he supposed not. Whatever this was, it was still a transaction. He was getting money and a remarkably good tutor out of the situation, and she was getting... what was she getting? She still had not purchased a single one of his racier photos or videos. If she was getting some sort of sexual gratification out of looking at what she had purchased then she had very puritan tastes.

He opened the link.

The photo on the page was in much better focus than the hasty shot Viktor had sent him and left him with no doubts at all about her identity.

Dr. Rosemary Epps. He had known she was older than him—she had to be, if she already had her doctorate and was well-established in a corporate research position—but running the math on her graduation dates made him realize how much older for the first time. Eight years, give or take a matter of months. And her CV was... well, she was a good tutor for a reason, he supposed.

He had hoped that opening the link would make him feel better, but it just made things worse, leaving him with a sick, twisting sensation in his stomach, the result of thoughts he did not want to examine.

Why was he feeling like this?

He stared intently at the photo on LinkedIn. It was sharper, clearer than he had seen her face in the month since they had started talking. Without thinking about why, he saved that photo to his phone.

And then he curled up on his bed, suddenly exhausted, and was unconscious in minutes.


	7. Chapter 7

Rosemary headed home after watching Al tease Viktor for a good 15 minutes, something he seemed to be doing only to annoy Marcus, who got more and more belligerent the longer Al flirted. Miranda only watched with a drink in hand and a half-smirk on her face and made no move to intercede. And if Al were planning to pick a fight with Marcus just to fight, Rosemary decided that she didn’t want to be around for either the action or the aftermath.

A quick message to ScienceFoolery didn’t get any answer, though, so she resigned herself to an early night. Probably a good thing, to be honest; she had stayed up far too late far too many nights as of late, just because she hadn’t been willing to cut him off when he’d been so obviously invested in whatever they’d been talking about at the time.

But it was worrying, too, after the wide-eyed look Viktor had given her when he’d been introduced to her. Rosemary had thought about pulling him aside and asking him not to tell his friend about her, but she hadn’t been able to find any subtle way to do it without drawing Al’s attention to her, so she would just have to hope that whatever Viktor told ScienceFoolery, he wouldn’t take it too badly.

And then she let out a little laugh and shook her head. Why should she care? If he decided he didn’t want to talk to her any more, it would just free up her evenings, that was all.

Her heart clenched hard in her chest at the thought of never hearing from him again.

Well.

That was unwelcome.

But even more unwelcome was the fact that he did not contact her once that weekend. No response to her message from Friday saying that she was home, no requests to talk over a paper, nothing. Not that he needed to. Not that she needed him. But there were no new pictures on his OnlyFans, either, and some small part of her couldn’t help but worry that something horrible had happened to him.

A few days later, and she caved and searched up his troupe. Naughty Clown Burlesque had a Facebook page and a list of upcoming events, and Rosemary purchased a ticket for that Friday’s performance at a burlesque revue before she could even consider the fact that it was a stalker move. At least she could pretend it was for a good cause; they were raising funds for the charity that ran the local women’s shelter. And just because she’d purchased the ticket didn’t mean she needed to actually go.

Oh, who the hell was she kidding. She was going to go. For just long enough to make certain that her clown was doing just fine. And then she would leave.

She just hadn’t anticipated her seat would be at one of the tables in the front row.

Alexander had started and erased what felt like a hundred messages a day to R0513—to Rosemary—in the week since Viktor had told him her real name. It did not help that after the message he had missed from her that night, she had not contacted him once. Had not purchased anything from his OnlyFans, either, not that he had taken any new photos recently. And she had worked her way through all of the ones that did not involve his dick.

He did not want to think of it like a test, but perhaps he _was_ testing her, in a way. Perhaps he wanted to see if she would move on to purchasing the content that was overtly sexual if he did not provide her with anything else.

Perhaps he wanted to know if…

But he shied away from that thought. Would it be so bad if she were just a kind woman who felt bad for him and was only purchasing his photos to give her an excuse to buy him groceries? Would it be so bad if there was nothing sexual about it? If she just… liked him?

No, he supposed there was nothing terrible about that scenario, though the longer she went without contacting him again, the more he began to suspect it was not true. If she had just been doing this to be kind, she would have continued as usual, would she not have? Which must mean that…

What did it mean?

Unfortunately, the only person who could answer that question was also the only person Alexander seemed to be completely incapable of communicating with right now.

But he could think of this later, when he was not about to go on stage for a performance he had not really wanted to take part in. All tips at charity performances went to the charity in question, so he would only net his performance fee for the night, and it really did not seem worth the time to participate. Unfortunately, one of the other flyers was out sick with a rather nasty flu, and it was him performing or the entire troupe sitting it out. Perhaps he could make that decision for himself, but he would not make it for everyone else as well.

He finished running his way through the set of slow stretches that limbered him up for what he was about to do and joined the others where they were clustered in a loose group backstage.

The building was set up as a dinner theater, and the stage was a half-circle that protruded out among the tables. The lights were too bright for him to see much of the audience, though from the heckling that happened as the troupe performed, Alexander suspected that several someones in the audience were extremely drunk and ready to make fun of anything even slightly out of the ordinary.

Viktor and Mace tossed him up into the air, and just for a moment he was high enough above the glare of the lights to see the crowd. A moment long enough to catch a glimpse of a fat Black woman in a gold dress at one of the tables near the front, her head of dark brown curls looking very familiar to him, even from above.

But no, he had to be mistaken. There was no reason for her to be there.

Was there?

As much as he strained for the rest of the performance, he could not catch a good enough look at the woman to be certain that it was Rosemary, but that did not stop him from trying. And afterwards, when Mace gathered them all together backstage and asked for a volunteer for the lap dance auction—the flyer who was out sick had been the previous volunteer—Alexander stepped up before anyone else could. It would be mortifying, of course, even if the woman he had spotted were actually Rosemary. But if _had_ actually been her, perhaps this might be enough to goad her into action.

Though what he meant by that incoherent thought, he had no idea.


	8. Chapter 8

“And now, the highlight of our evening: the auction!”

Rosemary froze halfway through standing up. The auction. One person from each group that had performed that night. Some of the groups were offering dates with their performers, some private lessons, and Naughty Clown Burlesque... well, they were offering a lap dance.

It wouldn’t be him. The listing outside the venue had said the person being auctioned went by Dimples, and Rosemary sincerely doubted that her clown went by Dimples.

But she sat back down anyway.

The announcer—or perhaps she was an auctioneer—had kept up her patter the entire time, most of which Rosemary had missed. And then the performers were beckoned out on stage, and it _was_ him. Standing at the end of the line, looking remarkably glum under his painted-on smile.

She didn’t really register the auction after that. She just watched him as the auctioneer moved down the line, as pole-dance lessons went for a song, as a date with a woman even more ample than Rosemary and strapped into a gorgeous corset was fought over between two butch lesbians, the final bid coming out to almost a grand, in the end.

“Finally, standing in for Dimples, we’ve got a lap dance from Tiny the clown! Winner has to claim their prize immediately, right up here on stage.”

ScienceFoolery—Tiny, she supposed she could call him— turned on his performer persona, every move exaggerated as he did a neat little tumble to bring him to the front of the stage, springing to his feet and waving cheerily at the audience, a smile that she was certain was fake plastered on his face.

There was jeering from the audience. The first bid was insultingly low, the second the same. And Rosemary saw how this would go: people bidding as low as they could to get a lapdance from a clown, which they would then foist off on whichever of the friends with them they felt like embarrassing most that evening. And from the strained expression on Tiny’s face and the amused one on the auctioneer’s, they knew it too.

And she hated it. Never mind the fact that she had tried to use lap dances from clowns as a way to humiliate Al, not that long ago. There was a difference between a party full of friends all having good fun and a public humiliation, and this definitely fell into the latter category.

Well, she would just have to do something to stop it, that was all.

Alexander fought to keep the smile on his face as bidding went on, one insulting bid after another, jeers and snickers accompanying each one. Yes, this would absolutely be as mortifying as he expected it to be. He kept his gaze well above the heads of the crowd, visible now that the house lights were on, not wanting to know the faces of the people who planned to humiliate him.

“One hundred dollars.” A low, raspy, _familiar_ voice spoke up, out-bidding the previous high bid by a good ninety dollars. The room went silent at that, just for a moment, and then the crowd burst into laughter.

“One hundred dollars?” The auctioneer repeated, staring wide-eyed down into the crowd, directly at Rosemary at her table in the front row.

“That’s right.” Rosemary lifted her chin in a challenge.

The auctioneer did not seem like she knew what to do with that. “Any further bids?” she asked weakly, looking out into the crowd. “No? Going once, going twice, and sold to the woman in the gold dress.” She cleared her throat. “Will you be claiming the prize yourself, or is this for a friend?”

“Oh, for me,” Rosemary said, getting to her feet. Alexander leaned down mechanically, giving her a hand as she climbed the steep stairs up to the stage. “Cash, card, or check?” she asked the auctioneer, reaching for her purse. “And someone really ought to get a chair out here if I’m going to be getting a lap dance, hm?”

Alexander was shaking now, involuntarily, caught between nerves and that humiliation that still threatened. And then Rosemary turned and smiled at him, the corners of her eyes creasing into little wrinkles. It felt like an acknowledgement of just how ridiculous this situation was. “We’re in this together,” that smile said.

She paid the auctioneer and someone brought them a chair that she hung her purse off the back of before sitting primly on it. “Well, Tiny,” she said, loud enough for the audience to hear, “Show me what you’ve got.”

Somehow he got through most of his usual routine without shaking or falling apart entirely, a small miracle. And he managed it without getting an erection, which he rather thought was even more of a miracle, though it was a very close thing there at the end, when he straddled her lap and got even more up close and personal with her than he already had been. But she just kept smiling that calm smile at him, and he smiled in return, despite the loud mockery and laughter from the audience.

His knees almost gave out when she spoke, barely audible over the audience. “Want to get out of here after this is over?” she murmured up at him. “I could take you home.”

His mouth dried out completely. “Yes,” he rasped quietly back at her.

“Meet me in the parking garage. Third floor. The red Bug.”

Alexander gave her one swift, jerky nod, and then drew his performance to a close, withdrawing himself reluctantly from her lap and making a beeline for backstage. He gathered up his jacket and his bag before hunting Viktor down, tapping him on the arm to get his attention. “I will not need a ride.”

Viktor raised his eyebrows and gave Alexander a dubious look, obviously waiting on an explanation.

“Rosemary. She is... She offered to take me _home_.”

Viktor frowned at that. “I see. And you are comfortable with this?”

He nodded. “But if it makes you feel better, my phone is actually charged tonight,” Alexander lied. And it was not much of a lie; he had his charger with him, and he had no doubt that Rosemary would have a place he could plug it in. “I will call you if I run in to trouble.”

“Be careful. You have condoms?”

Alexander blushed. “No. Do you...?”

Viktor nodded. “Just a moment.” A minute later, he shoved a strip of condoms Alexander’s way, and Alexander stuffed them hastily in his shoulder bag and made his way out of the venue, trying not to run and mostly succeeding.

The third floor of the parking garage was half-empty, and he froze at the top of the stairs, absent-mindedly scanning for the car Rosemary had described as he had second thoughts. Was he really going to do this?

“Hey! Tiny!”

He turned his head to find Rosemary leaning against the side of a red VW Beetle, that gold dress she looked so good in shining in the lights of the parking garage, and decided that yes, he absolutely was.


	9. Chapter 9

Rosemary settled into the driver’s seat and buckled herself in. “So, where are we headed?”

Tiny gave her a blank look as he fumbled with his seat belt. “What?”

“Your apartment. What’s the address?” Rosemary waved her phone at him, the Maps app open.

To her amusement, his ears turned bright red. “Ah,” he said, sounding mortified. “I, ah, I thought that...” he trailed off, every inch of his face that wasn’t covered by face paint now approximately the hue of a ripe tomato.

And then she realized what he must have thought she had been asking him to do, and she blushed herself. “Oh. Oh _no_ ,” was all that she managed to get out, following it after an extremely painful silence by a tightly whispered “Oh, _god_.”

On the plus side, she was pretty sure that things couldn’t get _more_ awkward in her car.

“Did... did you _want_ that?” she managed to ask.

He let out a strange little squeak, almost like steam escaping a kettle. “I... I do not know,” he said after a moment. “I think... I would understand that.” He turned to look at her, a distressed expression on his face. “But I do not understand what _this_ is.”

Rosemary studied him carefully. “Does it bother you, then, that I’m not as much of a dirty old woman as I could be?” she asked him.

“You are not old,” he said, a swift, scathing accusation.

“Older, though. Which you have to know.”

There was a resigned sigh from him. “Yes.”

“And you know exactly how much older now, I bet.”

Another resigned sigh, another whispered “Yes.” And then he sat up straight and glared at her. “Something I learned from _Viktor_ , who has given me more information about you than you ever have.”

“You could have asked.”

“You could have told me!” He was indignant now, and angry with it. “I do not know what this is,” he said in a voice that wasn’t quite a yell. “You do not seem to want what I am selling, not really. But we are not friends, because a friend would have told me her name, _Rosemary_! A friend would care about mine!”

“What is your name, then?”

The question seemed to disarm him, his skinny chest deflating as he sagged back against the seat. “I... I think I would rather not tell you,” he muttered.

Rosemary sighed. “Well, at least put your address in my phone, all right?” She waved it at him. “Or an approximate one. You can delete it from the history once we get there. Whatever you need to do to feel safe.”

He snatched the phone out of her hand and a few moments later, navigation started up. “I feel safe with you,” he said quietly, barely audible over the computerized female voice telling Rosemary to turn left at the next light.

She did not believe him, but now didn’t feel like the right time to call him out on it.

The rest of the drive passed in silence, and when Rosemary pulled up outside an old and dingy apartment block, Tiny handed her phone back and slid out of the car. “Thank you,” he said stiffly, before turning his back on her and stalking off towards the apartment building without a backwards glance.

Rosemary swallowed hard. Well. It was clear he did not want to be her friend.

So maybe it was time for her to be what he expected.

Alexander slept uneasily that night. He had expected to be embarrassed by what had happened on stage, but that was nothing compared to the private mortification he had experienced in Rosemary’s car. And the only thing that awaited him the next morning was further embarrassment in the form of notifications from OnlyFans.

Rosemary had purchased a video. One of the ones of him doing a striptease and then masturbating. And there, alongside it, a generous tip, not as generous as her usual but still several times the price of the video, and a message saying she was still there to talk if he needed any more help studying.

He was disappointed, somehow. Though why he should have been disappointed when he had wanted to have sex with her the night before, when he had been confused by her because she had not purchased such content from him already, he did not know.

But the truth was, he studied better with her help. Discussing the concepts he needed to have memorized for his qualifying exams made them easier to remember, and she always had an amusing anecdote or two or some recommended reading to help set them further in place. And it was less than a month before he needed to take them, so as mortified as he was by the thought of interacting with her again, he would just have to buckle down and deal with it.

He sent her a message asking if she had time that afternoon, and put it from his mind.

“You look glum,” Isabel said as he came into the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

She poured him a mug full from their janky old coffee maker, and Alexander dumped in enough creamer and sugar to make it palatable. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Alexander growled.

“O-kaaay. Right.” Isabel took a deliberate sip from her own mug. “You’re a terrible liar.”

Alexander sighed. “I am just tired, Isabel.”

“Yeah, so what else is new? But it usually just makes you cranky, not like…” she gestured vaguely at him. “ _This._ ”

“My qualifying exams are coming up.”

“Your qualifying exams are a month away. Try again.”

“I do not really want to talk about it.”

“Tough luck. You’re annoying enough to live with when you’re cranky, but I absolutely refuse to live with a man who spends all of his time _moping_.” Isabel nudged him gently with her elbow. “Come on. Whatever’s bugging you, spill.”

Alexander cradled his mug in both hands against his chest and stared down at it. “I think I am in love with Rosemary,” he mumbled in its direction, not daring to look at Isabel.

“Rosemary?” Isabel asked, sounding confused. And the she let out a disbelieving laugh. “You mean your _sugar daddy_?”

“Do not make fun of me, I am embarrassed enough about it already,” Alexander muttered, taking a sip of his coffee.

“Alex. Please tell me you’re not serious. You know it’s just got to be because she’s buying you food, right? Like, sure, it’s a good reason to feel all warm and fuzzy when you think about her, but it’s not love,” Isabel said dismissively.

“It is not that,” he protested, turning a pleading look on Isabel. “Or not just that,” he added when she raised her eyebrows dubiously. “She… we…” But he trailed off, unable to put words to the way she had started to mean something to him, over the weeks that they had been talking every night.

Isabel frowned and took a swig from her mug, emptying it, then set it down on the counter with a decisive clunk. “Okay. Okay, fine. If I accept that you’re in love with her—and I’m not sure I do, because I think that even you have to see that’s ridiculous—then what?”

“I do not know,” Alexander said miserably. “That is the problem. She is…” He sighed. “I think you will just have to live with a man who mopes.”

“Oh, hell no.” Isabel took his mug from him and set it on the counter next to hers and then took him by the elbows, shaking him slightly. “Look. If you like this woman—if you’re that damn sure that it isn’t just because she’s been making your life easier—then just go for it.”

Alexander opened his mouth, worked his jaw a few times, trying to make the words come out. “She offered me a ride home last night and I thought she was offering to take me to her home,” he managed to get out after a minute, high and squeaky. “It was mortifying, Isabel. She was too embarrassed to even let me down kindly.”

“Yeah, well, you were dressed like a clown last night, weren’t you?” At Alexander’s nod, she nodded decisively back. “So maybe what you need to do is find a way to make her see that that’s not all you are.”

“Do you really think so?” Alexander asked hopefully.

Isabel shrugged. “Well, it’s worth a try.”


	10. Chapter 10

Rosemary frowned down at the new message from ScienceFoolery. Tiny the clown. Whatever his name was.

**_I need to get outside more. Would you like to meet at café and get coffee while you quiz me?_ **

A terrible idea. Would he be in his makeup? Could she deal with having coffee with a clown in public?

But no matter how embarrassing such a thing would be for her, she suspected it would be a hundred times more embarrassing for him. So if he was willing to do it, so could she.

**_Sure. How’s the Starbucks on fifth? You free at 3?_ **

It was close enough to the local university that it shouldn’t be too far out of his way.

**_That works for me_ **

Rosemary stared blankly at her phone. Well, here she was. Planning to go to Starbucks. With a clown stripper. To help him study for his microbiology quals. How had this become her life?

She frowned and typed a further message, sending him her number, just in case they weren’t able to find one another. Not that he would be difficult to spot if he were in full makeup, even if he wore street clothing with it, but she was far more likely to see a text or get a call than to notice a message on either Gmail or OnlyFans.

A moment later her phone buzzed. **_And here is mine_** , the text said, from an unknown number. She wondered whether she ought to put it in as Tiny or as ScienceFoolery, and couldn’t bring herself to choose either. Well, he would just have to be a number to her for now.

At two, she made her way downtown by bus, taking a long, convoluted route that involved a walk at the end, wondering what the fuck she was even doing. Did she really want to see him face to face after last night? Was she really _that_ bored?

At least she hadn’t been bored enough to actually watch the video she’d purchased. She hadn’t sunk that low.

She made it to the Starbucks at a couple of minutes past three and glanced around the tables inside. No sign of a clown. There was a fellow in the back with a bald head, but on closer inspection he only bore a passing resemblance to ScienceFoolery, though it was hard to tell exactly what he looked like around the chunky plastic glasses he was wearing. She frowned and pulled out her phone as she joined the line.

**_I’m here. Can I order you something?_ **

“An iced coffee,” a low, Russian-accented voice said next to her ear.

Rosemary whipped her head up, startled. The bald fellow from the table at the back of the café was looking over her shoulder at her phone screen. “Sorry, do I know you?”

She could see now that he had no hair at all, the space above his eyes bare of eyebrow, the chunky glasses overwhelming the structure of his face. At her question he raised one of those nonexistent eyebrows and smiled, a shy little smile that just barely turned up the corners of his mouth. “Rosemary, the paint cannot possibly be _that_ good of a disguise.”

She let out a breathless laugh. “I think it’s the nose that’s really throwing me.” This version of her clown had a swooping beak of a nose that made him look just a little bit grim. “An iced coffee?” she asked, trying desperately to gain some control over the current situation, or at least over herself. “Room for cream and sugar?”

He nodded. “I will go guard table,” he said with another of those little smiles.

“Sure,” she replied, not really certain what else to say. “Be there in a sec.”

Rosemary watched him walk away, a slow, loping walk that managed not to betray anything of the other version of him she had met. It was only when the barista called her for the second time, irritation in his voice, that she realized she had been staring.

Alexander was trying not to smile too much, but some small part of him wanted to jump up on a table and crow with jubilation. Step one of his experimental plan to get Rosemary to realize that he was a man and not just a clown seemed to be going well. Very well.

She could not seem to stop staring at him, studying his face like it was a puzzle she needed to solve. And she was definitely having trouble paying attention to their conversation.

“Is something wrong?” he asked when he glanced up from the paper they were discussing to find her frowning across the table at him.

Her eyes opened very wide, as if startled, and she let out a light, embarrassed laugh. “Oh, god, sorry! I just…” and then, as if following some impulse she could not control, she reached across the table and tapped the tip of his nose with one finger. “I was just so used to the clown nose,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “This is… different.”

Alexander found he could barely breathe. “It is just my face.”

“I know, it’s just… not the face I’d gotten used to seeing.” She bit her lower lip, and those reaching fingertips ghosted upwards, as if they wanted to trace his eyebrow ridge next. “Alopecia?”

He nodded. “Since I was a child.”

“I thought you just plastered them down with glue or something.”

He shook his head. “My lack of eyebrows is au naturel, I am afraid.”

She pulled her hand back hastily, grasping the edge of the table with it, as if trying to restrain herself. “It’s… nice. You have… a nice face.”

He felt himself blush, knew he had to be as bright red as the clown nose he was currently missing. “Thank you. You… you have a nice face too.”

It was gratifying to see her blush in turn, her brown cheeks darkening to a ruddy hue that he thought might be his new favorite color. “Well, aren’t you a flatterer,” she said, a raspy little hint of sarcasm in her voice. She cleared her throat and turned to the paper that was set between them. “I have no idea what we were talking about. Let’s start again?”

Alexander nodded and turned back to the paper himself, not quite ready to press his luck further.

But inside, he was filled with a warm glow of happiness that he could not help but hope would last.


	11. Chapter 11

Rosemary still didn’t know her clown’s name. They’d met up in person a few more times, out in public, without the makeup, and he no longer bothered putting it on for video chatting either, but it seemed like any time she neared the topic of what his actual name was, he asked her a question that derailed her train of thought entirely. She’d tried asking in a message on OnlyFans, and then in a text, but he hadn’t answered either of them.

It was driving her insane.

Insane enough to try and track down Boffo the power bottom for further intel.

She wasn’t quite sure yet how to get him alone for long enough to ask the questions she wanted to, of course. Hell, she wasn’t sure he would even answer them. But from what information she’d been able to weasel out of Al, Viktor was still very much showing up at the bar they all went to after work on Fridays, meeting Marcus and Miranda there and, according to Al, staring at Al like an abandoned puppy the entire time.

“It’s real awkward, Rosie,” Al said, rubbing his hand over his face. “Like he thinks I’ll get jealous of Marcus and swoop in and rescue him.”

Rosemary snorted and raised a dubious eyebrow. “And are you planning to?”

“Lord, no.” Al paused and considered for a moment. “Well, if Marcus hurts him, I’ll probably scoop him up and give him a good night if he wants one. But that’s about all he’s getting from me. And I reckon that would hurt him just as much as anything Marcus could do, if he’s expectin’ rescue.”

“Poor boy. So are you going to happy hour, then, or…?”

Al shook his head. “Nah. I don’t think I can take another night of that. And maybe Marcus will stop toying with the poor fellow if I stop giving in to the urge to needle him.”

Rosemary tried not to smile too broadly at that. “Well, I’ll let you know how things develop. Maybe give poor Boffo a little talk about how Marcus and Miranda do things.”

“If you could work in a warning about me, I’d much appreciate it.”

“Will do, darling.”

In the end, it was almost ridiculously easy to get the information she was looking for. Waltz up to Miranda and Marcus at their table to say hello, and then turn to Viktor—who had once again gone white as a sheet at her approach—and introduce herself again.

“And it’s Viktor, isn’t it?” Rosemary flashed him her best smile, and he blushed. “You know, I think the two of us have a friend in common.”

“Ah, yes. Alexander,” Viktor mumbled, his ears turning the same dark red as his cheeks.

“Yes, that’s right.” Rosemary tapped her lower lip theatrically with her pointer finger. “You know, there’s something I want to pick your brain about,” she said, tucking her hand beneath Viktor’s elbow. “Marcus, do you mind if I borrow your swain and buy him a drink?”

“Oh, if you _must_.” Marcus said, rolling his eyes. “But no stealing him, hm?” he added playfully. “And you’d better give him back in one piece.”

“Oh, just because I’m a man-eater,” Rosemary shot back, low and full of a humor she didn’t quite feel. “No need to make the boy terrified of me, Marcus, I think I can manage to do that well enough on my own.”

Miranda snorted into her glass of gin.

Viktor didn’t seem to be able to do anything but follow her away from the table and towards the bar.

“What would you like, darling? It’s on me.”

Viktor shrugged. “I… whatever you would like,” he said.

Now that she had him away from Marcus and Miranda, Rosemary noticed that he was swaying a little where he stood, and his words were a little slurred. “In that case I think I’m going to be a cheapskate and get you a bottle of water,” she said, waving over the bartender.

The look of gratitude on Viktor’s face was almost pathetic.

“They’re hard to keep up with, hm?”

He nodded and downed half the bottle in one prolonged gulp before wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. Rosemary tilted her head to one side and studied him. He looked well on his way to being dead drunk and tired with it.

“Are you all right, darling?”

He gave her a startled look. “I thought you wanted to talk about Alexander.”

“Do _you_ want to talk about Alexander?”

“I…”

“Or would you rather talk about one Albert Bennett and his glorious dick?” Rosemary smirked as Viktor turned the color of a beetroot again. “The dick’s fun, darling, but that’s all he has to give you.”

Viktor sighed and took another slug from the water bottle. “Are you sure?”

Rosemary nodded. “I tried for three years to make it work. But he’s… He doesn’t do that. Become his friend and he’ll stick with you through thick and thin, but if it’s romance you’re after…”

Viktor sighed again and leaned against the bar. “I’d be fine with fucking him until I get him out of my system,” he said mournfully.

“Well, I think you’re coming on a bit too strong for that. Let him know it’s just sex you’re after and he’ll be more than happy to give you what you want.”

Viktor let out a disbelieving laugh. “You know, this is a very strange conversation.”

“I tend to attract those,” Rosemary said, smiling kindly at him. “Feeling better?”

Viktor nodded. “I think I will go back to Marcus now, if you do not mind.”

“Go right ahead, darling.”

He smiled shyly at her. “Alexander is very lucky to have you,” he said, before swinging around and heading back to the table.

And Rosemary was left staring at his back, wondering what on Earth he’d meant by that.

Alexander knew he would have to tell Rosemary his name eventually, but for now he was enjoying the way she got all worked up about the fact that he had not. There was a certain way her eyes lit up when she was about to ask him what his name was and a certain annoyed amusement about her when he managed to deflect her before she could that he found extremely gratifying.

He was not certain whether to be gratified or not by the way she had purchased three more of his racier videos. Neither of them mentioned it when they talked face-to-face, either over video chat or in person, and he supposed that was better than having to talk about them with her. Some part of him was terrified that she would critique his performance.

A completely different part of him was terrified she had watched the videos and had found him wanting in other aspects. That base, venal part of him that kept wondering what the bits of her that had only been hinted at by that tiny gold dress of hers looked like, that kept wondering when it _would_ be a good time to ask her if she would be willing to fuck him senseless.

He thought he should probably figure out how to kiss her, first. Whether she would even want to kiss him.

He pulled out his notebook. Isabel had laughed and rolled her eyes when he had decided to approach the entire thing like he would plan an experiment, but then she had helped him plan. “Get to first base and go from there,” she had suggested. “Take your cues from her. Some ladies like to be wooed for a little while first, but some of them are happy to go all the way at once if they’re enjoying themselves.”

So far, Isabel’s advice had served him well. Rosemary still seemed unduly fascinated by his face without the clown makeup on, and meeting up in person meant that she touched him, too. Perhaps just the same small touches and taps one might expect from a good friend, but it was better than the nothing he had previously had.

It was torture, too, but with his qualifying exams two weeks away, he could not think about that right now. Once they were over, he would make his move.

Until then, he would just have to make Rosemary forget he had ever been a clown.

His phone buzzed, and he opened his messages to find a text from Rosemary, following her most recent message asking what his name was.

**_I can’t call you Tiny forever_ **

No, she could not.

And as much as he wanted to tease her a little longer, if he wanted to truly shed his clown persona where she was involved, he would have to tell her eventually.

 ** _It’s Alexander Hilbert_** , he texted back.

**_Nice to meet you, Alexander._ **

He fell back on his bed with a smile, his phone clutched to his chest, feeling, just for a moment, perfectly content.


	12. Chapter 12

It was a relief that Alexander had finally decided to tell her his name. Rosemary had realized after Viktor had spilled it that she didn’t really have any good way to keep herself from accidentally calling Alexander by his real name, and if she did that, he would want to know how she had learned it, and she really did _not_ want to admit to him just how much of a stalker she’d been. Oh, she supposed she could play it off as mentioning him to Viktor and Viktor accidentally using his real name, and Viktor would probably verify that story if Alexander asked, but _she_ knew the truth, and the truth was _awfully_ embarrassing.

It was nice to be able to call him Alexander in her head. She’d gotten a little too comfortable with privately calling him _her_ clown; calling him Alexander helped her gain a much-needed bit of mental distance.

As his exams got closer, he got more and more focused, which was another thing that helped. It mostly stopped him from flirting clumsily with her, and it stopped her from flirting back, something she shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.

“I should do something to thank you when exams are over,” he was currently muttering over the paper he was scribbling notes on.

“No need. It’s been fun to go back and review all of this stuff.”

He looked up and focused on her intently for a moment. “I could take you to dinner…?” he suggested cautiously.

Rosemary let out a light laugh that she hoped didn’t sound too fake. “I object to being bought dinner with what will most likely be my own money,” she teased.

He frowned at that. “What if I cooked you dinner?”

Rosemary doubted it would be very good, given what she had gathered of his eating habits in the time since they had first started talking, but decided to humor him. After all, it wasn’t as if she was a stellar cook herself. “I assume I would have to purchase ingredients for it?”

He nodded, the better part of his attention absorbed by the paper once more. “Could make potato pancakes. And dumplings,” he said absentmindedly. “Do not have the space to make dumplings in my apartment.” He frowned again and set his pen down, turning his focus back to her. “Do you have a mandoline?”

Rosemary laughed. “What on earth does having a mandoline have to do with making dumplings?”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “Nothing. There is… ah. I do not know what to call it in English, but it is a carrot salad I grew up eating. With so much garlic it makes your mouth burn.” He pursed his mouth, considering. “A cheese shredder would do, but it would not be as good.”

Rosemary laughed again. All right, maybe he was a better cook than she was giving him credit for, or at least a more varied one than she was. She tapped the paper with her fingertip. “Back to work. We can discuss whether or not you’ll cook me dinner later.”

Another lopsided smile that was annoyingly cute, and he turned back to the paper in front of him. And Rosemary tried not to think too much about the fact that her attachment to him was really becoming a problem.

But that was another thing she could put off dealing with until Alexander was done with his exams.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to spend so much time with Rosemary in person, as distracted as her physical presence made him, but Alexander could not regret it. The wifi in his apartment had never been good enough for video chat to be anything but blurry and choppy, but now that she was right here with him, he could appreciate her subtle changes of expression, could hear the raspy timbre of her voice in a way that never came through over the internet.

And now that he was neck-deep in two weeks of exams, he missed her presence dearly. But he knew he would find it distracting to talk to her now. He settled for sending her a message at the end of each day, telling her how things were going.

They seemed to be going well, at least. Rosemary’s help had been invaluable. He was almost certain that he would pass his qualifying exams with flying colors.

And then… and then, perhaps a place in a program with funding.

He would think about the fact that he might have to move to another state to find such a thing later. Because if he thought too hard about the fact that if he left this city, he suspected he would never see Rosemary again, he would give in to the urge to do poorly on his exams on purpose. And he could not afford to do that, quite literally. If nothing else, doing well on his qualifying exams would make it possible to leave his program with a Masters degree under his belt without having to spend another six months or a year spending his nights performing with the troupe or stripping for a webcam as he tried to make enough money to keep himself alive.

He wondered if Rosemary missed him as much as he missed her. She certainly texted him encouragement all week long, and more than that, she kept a steady stream of tips coming that made it possible for him to impulse-purchase prepared foods and caffeinated beverages whenever he needed them.

He had no words for how much he appreciated that.

Finally, eventually, those two weeks of exams were over. A sort of vague exhaustion, present but strangely detached from his body, overtook him when he finished his final exam, and he went back to his apartment and slept for twelve hours straight.

He woke to a pair of texts from Rosemary.

 ** _I’m free tomorrow evening_** , the first said, though from the time stamp she must mean this evening.

**_Did you still want to do dinner?_ **

He still wanted to cook for her, and hoped that she would let him.

 ** _I will come up with list of ingredients for you,_** he sent back. **_Could start cooking tonight at 5?_**

Her only response was an address.

Alexander clutched his phone to his chest and tried to remain calm, but a shout of joy escaped him in spite of his best efforts.

A second later Isabel shoved his door open. “Alexander?”

“Sorry! I am fine.”

Isabel leaned against his door frame and studied him. “I can see that. Haven’t moped in weeks, even.”

Alexander could not manage to keep his excitement in. “I am going to her apartment tonight,” he babbled. “I am cooking her dinner.”

Isabel smiled. “Good luck and godspeed, little clown.” And then she raised an eyebrow. “You need condoms?”

“Why does everyone always ask me that?” Alexander complained. He still had that strip of them from Viktor, stuffed in the bottom of his shoulder bag.

“You really want the answer to that?”

Alexander made a face at his roommate. “No.”

“Good, because I think that conversation might get just a little bit _too_ candid, if you know what I mean.”

Alexander had no idea, but he could not bring himself to care. Because tonight, he was going to be in Rosemary’s apartment.

And perhaps, if he were very lucky, he would get to use those condoms.


	13. Chapter 13

Rosemary knew she shouldn’t have invited Alexander over for dinner. It was a bad idea, in all ways, and just when she’d found an easy and appropriate way to distance herself from him, what with the qualifying exams she had been helping him study for now in the past. But she really did want to celebrate the end of his exams with him, regardless of how well he wound up doing on them. And more than that, she had missed him over the past two weeks, far more than an acceptable amount.

The problem was, she was invested. Had invested so much of her time in him, and far too many of her emotions as well, when she shouldn’t have been spending this much time thinking about a man who had to be, what, seven or eight years younger than her? And even if the age gap were not as great as she suspected, even if he had gone to college late or taken a few gap years between undergrad and grad school, he was still a grad student, and she was still an established employee at one of the top research labs in the country. A place where Alexander, if he chose to leave academia, might want to work some day.

She could ruin his entire career, one he hadn’t even started yet, if she chose to pursue this and things went poorly between them. She wouldn’t even have to be intentional about it. And that worried her.

The shy, crooked little smile he gave her when she answered her apartment door at his knock made her heart start pounding in her chest, and that worried her even more.

“What can I do to help?” she asked as he spread ingredients out in her kitchen and pillaged her cabinets for knives and mixing bowls.

“Ah. Hm.” He pulled out her cheese grater and eyed it dubiously. “Could work on carrots?”

“Oh, wait! I bought a mandoline.” Rosemary dove for the plastic bag that she’d left on her kitchen table and pulled it out triumphantly.

Alexander laughed. “Do you have any use for a mandoline?”

“Well, I thought if that carrot salad was as good as you said, I might,” she shot back. “Should I just wash the entire bunch and shred them?”

“And be careful with the mandoline. They like to eat fingers,” he said with a smile, wiggling his fingers at her.

That smile set her heart thumping in her chest again. Rosemary turned her attention to the carrots instead, scrubbing them off in the sink, and, under Alexander’s direction, peeling them before she began running them through the mandoline, shredding them into thin strips. As she worked on the carrots, he busied himself making a simple dough, and then, while it rested, moving on to a mixture of ground meat and shredded onions to fill the dumplings with.

He moved around her kitchen with an ease that was unfamiliar to her. Her mother had never been much of a cook, and what few meals Abigail Epps had seen fit to teach her daughter to make had mostly consisted of dumping the contents of cans over egg noodles, mixing, and baking the entire thing until hot. And Rosemary hadn’t really had the time or the interest to take up cooking as a hobby, not when work had a decent cafeteria and the neighborhood she lived in had more than a few places that offered prepared food.

But this was nice. Homey, almost.

A pity it couldn’t last.

It took Alexander longer than he had thought it would to get everything on the table, even with Rosemary’s assistance. But she did not seem to mind when they did not sit down to dinner at her tall little kitchen table until about 8, so he tried not to mind either, though by that point his stomach was growling and he was light-headed, both with hunger and with the strange, visceral need he felt to get closer to this woman.

From the way she fell on the meal herself, he suspected she was feeling the same physical hunger he was, if not the other kind. Though from the way she had smiled at him when he had arrived… but perhaps he was reading too much into what might have just been one of her usual smiles. Those smiles made him breathless enough, even after two months of being inoculated against them by talking to her almost every day.

Once her initial hunger seemed to be sated, Rosemary scooped up a forkful of morkovcha and tasted it cautiously… and then, gratifyingly, she scooped up a second, larger forkful and stuffed the entire thing in her mouth. “Oh, this is really good.”

“It will taste even better when it has been sitting for a day or two,” he said with a smile.

“Well, I was going to send all the leftovers home with you, but I think I’m keeping this carrot salad.”

Alexander laughed. “Could I not have half?”

“Maybe a quarter, but you’ll have to fight me for it.” She grinned cheekily across the table at him, and he was certain that more than half of the salad would make its way home with him.

“It is all good?”

Rosemary laughed and looked down at her mostly-empty plate. “I’m debating whether or not to go back for seconds of everything, so yes, I’m afraid I’ve got to admit that you are an astonishingly good cook.”

“Did you think I would not be?” Alexander asked, bemused.

“As I recall, you considered a bag of frozen vegetables an exciting meal when we met.”

“Only because all I could afford to eat was rice and beans or ramen,” he protested. “One must have a good sense of flavor profiles to keep such meals palatable long-term,” he added with a sniff.

“Well, I believe it now,” she teased. “This was lovely. Thank you.”

Alexander blushed. “It is the least I could do. I do not think I would have done nearly as well on my exams as I think I did without your help.”

“When do you get the results, anyway?” Rosemary swung to her feet and carried her plate over to the oven, swinging it open and using a pair of tongs to scoop out a few more potato pancakes from where they were keeping warm in there and adding a generous scoop of morkovcha from the bowl on the counter.

“Three to six weeks,” Alexander responded, eyes fixed on the curve of her lower back as she moved around the kitchen. When she turned back towards him, he blushed once more, certain she had caught him out as he eyed her.

“Here’s hoping it will be closer to the three than the six,” she said kindly. “You want anything while I’m up?”

Alexander shook his head and kept his mouth clamped shut, certain that if he let himself answer her the only word that would come out would be “You.” He swallowed hard, trying to dislodge that unspoken word, and looked around her kitchen instead, trying to find a new topic of conversation. “This is a very nice apartment.”

“And it comes with a decent landlord, which let me tell you, was much harder to find than a pretty place to live,” she said, settling herself back down in her chair. “Is your place as terrible as it always looked when we were video chatting?”

Alexander rolled his eyes. “Worse.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“At least I found a good roommate.” After three years living together, he and Isabel were more like family than anything else.

“Ah, I remember the days of needing a roommate to get by.” Rosemary propped her elbow up on the table and leaned her chin in her hand. “Would you believe that Al and I lived together for four years without either of us killing the other?”

Alexander did not know how to react to this. “I… uh…”

Rosemary laughed kindly. “Sorry. He’s just… we gave up on making it work years ago, but he’s still the person I love most, you know? Not romantically, but…” she trailed off, a fond, distant smile on her face.

Alexander wondered if this was her way of kindly warning him off.

And in the end, although their conversation moved on to different topics, although the way she smiled up at him when she offered to drive him home should have been more than enough enticement for him to ask if he could stay the night instead, he could not quite bring himself to make the move on her that he so desperately wanted to.


	14. Chapter 14

Rosemary faked a busy couple of weeks at work to keep Alexander at the distance of the occasional late-night video chat as she tried to decide what she ought to do about him. It didn’t seem to be space enough; the way his eyes lit up when she turned on her video the nights they chatted left her discombobulated and distressed and completely incapable of thinking rationally about the situation.

But when she got a text from him, early on Saturday morning, saying that his exam results had come in a week early and he had big news to share, and would she like to meet up for coffee?, she could not quite bear to refuse to see him in person.

 _ **There’s a park near your apartment**_ , she texted back. _**Want to go on a walk instead?**_

For all that it was a dark and dreary day, he agreed in an instant.

He met her in the parking lot at the edge of the park, a strange, jittery nervousness to him that left her nervous in turn. “Well?” she asked the instant she was out of her car. “Did you pass?”

He grinned from ear to ear. “With top marks, according to my advisor,” he said. “Come,” he added, gesturing down a path that lead off the parking lot, its pounded dirt surface muddy from the drizzle of rain that had been coming and going all day. “This path goes around lake, if you want to walk.”

Rosemary set off down the path with Alexander at her side, trying not to find it amusing when he took a couple of tries to figure out how to keep pace with her. She had grown used to walking alongside Al over the years they’d been together and the habit of walking quickly had never quite left her. “So? Have you heard about funding?”

Before Alexander could answer, the sky opened up in a torrential downpour. Rosemary let out a startled squawk and dove off the path proper, heading towards a decorative little gazebo that sat up the hill a little ways, overlooking the lake. Alexander followed her, letting out a delighted laugh.

“All right, so perhaps a walk was not the best idea today,” Rosemary admitted once they were safely out of the rain.

“Perhaps not,” Alexander said solemnly, looking down at her. “And to answer your question... I have funding.”

Rosemary grinned. That _was_ good news. “Congratulations!”

“Yes, well...” Alexander sighed and looked down, scuffing his toe against the concrete floor of the gazebo. “Not just for here. I was also offered a place at the University of California.”

Where they had one of the best micro research programs in the country. Rosemary forgot her determination to keep a distance and seized Alexander by the forearms, laughing and swinging him around in a tight little circle that almost felt like a dance. “Why didn’t you lead with that, silly?” Another burst of laughter escaped her. “My god, Alexander!”

“So you think I should go?”

“Darling, the University of California is an R1. Of course you should go.”

“It is on the other side of the country.”

“And you can always come right back here after you’re done. But opportunities like this don’t grow on trees!” She wanted to shake him for even considering it a real choice.

“What if...” he sighed. “What if there is some very good reason I do not want to leave here?”

Alexander stared desperately down at Rosemary, who was giving him an uncomprehending look.

“I know you have a lot of friends locally,” she said in what he suspected she meant as an encouraging tone, “But you’ll make more. And the internet makes it easy to keep in touch.”

Perhaps he never would have a chance with her. Perhaps that off-handed remark she had made about Al when they had had dinner together after he had finished his qualifying exams had really been the warning he had suspected it to be. Perhaps all his dreams about having this woman as his own were just that, dreams.

But before he could exchange one set of dreams for another, he had to be certain.

Rosemary seemed startled when his mouth came down on hers, but after a moment she adjusted against him, tilting her head subtly to fit her mouth to his, her eyes falling shut as if she could not keep them open. A moment more, and she was kissing him back, which was far more than he had expected from this step in his experimental plan. A plan he had discarded two weeks before, despairing of it ever working if it was her friend Al he was up against.

It seemed to be working now.

But he needed a moment to breathe, and a moment to consider, and a moment to make certain that she truly did want this too.

He pulled back to look at her. Her lips were still slightly pursed, and her eyelashes fluttered, soft against her cheeks, and all Alexander wanted to do was kiss her again and again, until both of them were senseless with it. But no, he would wait for her reaction. Because if his kiss had been unwelcome…

“Oh,” she said in a low, quiet voice. “Oh,” she said again, and then her eyes snapped open. “I…” She studied him very intently, and Alexander held himself in check, though it was very difficult.

“I need some time to think about this,” she said after a moment of silence. Her expression was strange in some way, as if her usual smiles were a mask that had been stripped away, leaving nothing at all underneath.

He did not understand it. He wished he could peek inside her head and see what she was really feeling in that moment. But he could not.

All he could do was give her space. “Very well.” He realized his hands were curled around her upper arms and released her. “But we will talk about it?” _Before I have to make a decision about Ph.D. programs,_ he left unsaid.

She smiled, but it seemed strained. “Of course.” Her eyes darted past his shoulder, then down to the ground, and she took a step back from him. “I think I’d like to head home now, if you don’t mind.”

He minded. How could he not? But from her sudden awkwardness, he also knew that her request for time to think had been in earnest, and insisting she stay would only make things worse. “Not at all.”

She gave him another smile, this one brief but almost real. “Thanks.” And then she waved and was on her way, ducking out into the misty drizzle that the downpour had slackened off into—probably at some point while they had been kissing—and making her way back towards the parking lot.

He watched her until she was out of sight, and then made his own slow and meandering way home to his apartment. Once there, he tried to find something that would distract him enough to keep him from checking his notifications every five minutes, he really did. But as the evening dragged on, his ability to concentrate eluded him. He found himself wondering what Rosemary was doing. Had she been thinking about him as much as he had been thinking about her? Had she been replaying that kiss in her mind the way he had in his?

Alexander’s phone buzzed with a text, and he threw the book he was failing to read aside and snatched it up.

 _ **I’m sorry**_ , the text from Rosemary said.

Alexander frowned at his phone. Three dots blinked back up at him, mocking him with their lack of words. And then the next few texts came one after another, swift and fatal.

_**You were a really, really nice fantasy for a while** _

_**But that’s all you were** _

_**I can’t do this** _

_**I’m sorry** _

Alexander’s heart clenched in his chest, and his thumb went to the call button.

But no. She had not called him. She had broken things off with him—had broken up with him, if he could call it that when they had never really been dating—via text, which meant that she had wanted to avoid a phone conversation. And he had enough regard for her that he would give her the courtesy of not leaving the sobbing voicemail he could feel bubbling up inside him, no matter how much he wanted to.

 ** _Thank you for making my decision easy_** , he sent instead, and tried not to feel too bitter about it.

He failed at that, too.


	15. Chapter 15

Rosemary had considered a dozen different replies to Alexander’s last message over the past week and a half, but couldn’t find any point to sending them. So instead, she deleted his number from her phone, along with all of the texts they’d exchanged. Deleted the photos she had of him from Al's birthday, too, while she was at it. She even went to unsubscribe from his OnlyFans, too, but he had apparently deleted it before she could get there.

She almost regretted the fact that she had never actually downloaded any of the photos or videos she had purchased from him, with those photos from Al's birthday gone. And then she hated herself for that almost-regret.

She needed a distraction, and there was only one person she could think of who was distracting enough to take her mind off the mess she had made of things.

“Want to go get a drink after work?”

Al looked up from his security monitor and raised an eyebrow. “On a Wednesday?”

“Why not?”

He looked her up and down with a frown, and then shrugged. “All right, I’m not doing anyone tonight.”

“Al, _honestly._ ”

“Sorry, slip of the tongue. Not doing _anything_ tonight.” But from his cheeky grin, she knew it had been a deliberate slip.

Yes, he would be a very good distraction.

After work, they wandered down the street past their usual bar to a pub that served actual food instead of just bar snacks and alcohol. Al kept up a stream of ridiculous chatter about recent work gossip as they ate, and Rosemary did her best to pay attention to it, but her thoughts kept slipping back to Alexander.

“And of course, there’s poor Boffo—“ he was saying now, catching Rosemary’s attention.

“How is Viktor doing, anyway?” Rosemary interrupted. “You done playing with him?”

Al laughed. “Yeah. I introduced him to Eber after a week and they hit it off.”

“ _Really_.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And how does Marcus feel about this development?”

“He’s busy hovering jealously over Miranda right now. That one woman who runs the archive—what’s her name, Addie?”

“Adriane?”

“That’s the one. She finally made her move while Marcus was distracted with Viktor, and Miranda’s quite smitten.”

“Good for her. And good for Miranda, making Marcus squirm for once.”

Al laughed… and then he gave her a serious look, lapsing into the comfortable cadence of his Southern drawl. “And what’s been making you squirm lately, Rosie?”

“I…” But she couldn’t quite bring herself to lie to her oldest friend. “Al, I fucked up.”

He studied her face with a frown. “Somethin’ to do with that grad student you said you were mentoring?”

She nodded, feeling her face heat with embarrassment. “He… well, he liked me, Al. And I knew about it, and I shouldn’t have encouraged him, but I did, because it felt nice to be liked. Only… it went too far.”

Al chewed on the inside of his lower lip for a moment, still studying her. “Rosie… did you like him back?”

Sudden tears pricked the corners of her eyes. “I…” And then she sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I liked him a lot, Al.” She let out a bitter laugh. “And damn, did I overstep. He kissed me.” Another bitter laugh rasped its way out of her throat. “Hell, I kissed him back.”

“And now?”

“And now he’s going to grad school on the other side of the country, and thank goodness I’ll never see him again, because I can’t trust myself to set boundaries where he’s involved,” Rosemary said morosely, picking up one of the soggy fries left over from her dinner and glaring at it.

Al didn’t respond, only got up out of his side of the booth and so he could slide in beside her, tucking her under his arm and hugging her to his side. And in spite of the fact that she didn’t want to feel this way, in spite of the fact that there had been no real relationship to mourn, Rosemary turned her face to his shoulder and let herself cry.

Alexander was coping with his feelings by packing. He had not considered himself someone with a lot of personal belongings, but there was a difference between having them strewn about his bedroom and having to pack them all in boxes for a move across the country.

Fortunately, after a brief complaint about him being a sad sack as of late, Isabel had volunteered herself to help, both with the packing and with distracting Alexander from his moping.

“If you’re ever back in town and need a roommate, let me know,” Isabel said, scooping a few more textbooks off of Alexander’s cinderbrick and plank shelf. “You weren’t a terrible one, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to live with you again.”

“Thank you,” Alexander said drily, pointing her and her armload of books at the right box. “With luck, I will not need one, but thank you.” And then he frowned. “You will be all right without me?”

Isabel laughed. “Yeah. Renée’s lease is ending in a couple of weeks too. We’ve decided to find a new place together.”

Well, at least one of them was lucky in love. “Congratulations.”

Isabel looked up from tetrising the books into the box and grinned. “Yeah, thanks. She’s…” Isabel sighed. “She makes me really happy.”

Alexander felt himself smile despite the fact that he wasn’t really in the mood for it. “I am glad. One of us should be happy. This would be too depressing otherwise.”

“Yeah, well.” Isabel shrugged. “Sorry things didn’t work out with that sugar daddy of yours.”

Alexander sighed. “They were never going to. I do not think she could see past the way she had met me.”

“That’s rough, buddy,” Isabel said, her tone of voice making him think she was quoting something. “And I think that’s all this box will fit. You have the packing tape?”

Alexander tossed her the roll. “I will get over it in time.”

“Or you could do what I always do after a breakup: go to a gay bar and make out with random people until you feel better.”

Alexander snorted. Not the way he dealt with things at all. “Is that how you met Renée?”

Isabel gave him a look. “I can neither confirm nor deny such a rumor. And anyway, you’re not allowed to judge when you met that woman while performing as a clown stripper.”

Alexander sighed. “I will miss that.”

“Being a clown stripper?”

He shook his head. “No. But that troupe… they are all my best friends, apart from you. And I do not care for the stripping part, but I enjoyed the other parts of our performances.”

“Yeah, I suppose being yeeted into the air by a pair of burly clowns does seem like it would be fun,” Isabel said contemplatively.

Alexander smirked at her. “Well, if you are looking to pick up some extra cash, they are probably looking for a new flyer. You could put your athletic ability to use.”

Isabel held her hands up defensively. “Oh, no. You’re not talking _me_ into making the same bad decision you did. No way.”

“I am just saying…”

Isabel snatched his pillow of his bed and threw it at him, hitting him in the face, and they both dissolved into laughter.

And for just a little while, Alexander forgot how miserable he had been feeling.

Perhaps in a couple of years, he would manage to forget all about Rosemary Epps, too.


	16. Chapter 16

Rosemary opened the door to her lab, planning to head to the cafeteria and get herself some coffee. And then she froze, staring wide-eyed at the back of a bald man in a lab coat who had just gone past her lab door in a familiar loping walk, one she thought she’d forgotten years ago and which was still burned into her mind.

“Alexander?” Her voice wavered and cracked, but it had been loud enough to get his attention. The man froze as well, standing very still in the middle of the hallway before turning slowly to face her, a startled expression on his face.

He’d changed. Not a lot—the face beneath those wire-rimmed glasses was familiar, even if the glasses were new—but enough that he suddenly seemed grown up, in a way he had not before. His cheekbones were sharper, his forehead more creased, his shoulders a little broader.

Before she could think better of it she took two steps towards him and grabbed him by the arm, dragging him into her lab and shutting the door behind them. He offered no resistance, simply staring down at her in that same startled way, clearly uncertain of how to react.

“I...” she started breathlessly, and then laughed, dropping her hand from his arm. “God, how long has it been? Four years?”

His mouth opened slightly, and he let out a sigh. “Five.”

“You... you look good.”

This compliment only served to make him awkward and, she thought, a little annoyed. “Thank you,” he said stiffly, glaring down his nose at her.

“Are you working here now?”

He gave her a jerky nod. “Yes. Eber Weiss’s lab.”

“I did hear he was getting a new junior research assistant. I’m assuming Viktor told you about the job?”

Another stiff nod from Alexander, and _oh_ , this was hopeless. “I had forgotten that you still worked here,” he said. It sounded like he was forcing the words out, like it was almost physically painful for him to say them. “I did not intend to encroach upon your territory.”

Rosemary found she had reached towards him without thinking about it and had to pull herself forcibly back before she made contact. God, she had missed his face. “No, darling, that’s not it at all. I was just startled to see you here. But Goddard’s the top of the top. You belong here.”

Alexander’s jaw worked a few times, looking rather as if he intended to deny this, but what came out was something else entirely. “You are not... not going to tell anyone, are you?” he grated out, clearly forcing the words past his lips.

Rosemary frowned at him. “About what?”

“That I used to... that I sold...” For all that he could not say the exact words, it was enough for Rosemary to understand.

“Oh! Oh god, no.” She felt her face heat. “Look, darling, I know I used you badly, but surely you know me well enough to know I’d never.”

The expression on his face was lost and anxious now. “I thought I knew you. But I did not think the woman I knew back then would do what you did. So I was forced to reevaluate.”

Oh, she had used him worse than she thought. She frowned up at him. “For what it’s worth now, I’m sorry about that. I won’t even pretend I thought it was for your own good. I just...” she sighed. “I just needed to get away.”

His face twisted painfully. “Did the clown thing really bother you so much that you could not even consider me?”

Rosemary fought down a sick urge to laugh. This situation was completely ridiculous, of course, but the last thing she wanted was to make Alexander think she was laughing at him. “No, surprisingly enough, neither the clown thing or the sex work bothered me all that much, in the end.” She swallowed hard, trying to keep the laughter at bay. “Darling, did you spend the past five years under the impression that I broke things off with you because you were a clown-themed stripper?”

He nodded, the movement stiff and reluctant.

The laughter burbled out anyway. “I see,” Rosemary squeaked out around it. “Alexander, you were in _grad school_.”

Alexander frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Rosemary let out another laugh, one that sounded like it was forcing its way out of her despite her best efforts to keep it contained. “You’ve graduated now, haven’t you? With your Ph.D. and some teaching under your belt?”

He nodded cautiously, not knowing where she was going with this.

“Well, then. What would you do if, say...” her lips pursed into a frown as she considered for a moment, and he cursed himself for still wanting to kiss her after all of these years and all of the ways her rejection had made him hurt, even if it was a distant ache at most these days. “If a college junior you were giving advice to about grad schools decided to come on to you? One who you thought was attractive, one you liked as a person, but one who was definitely someone you were in a position of authority over.”

The thought made him break out into a cold sweat. He could very easily see himself failing to assert proper boundaries until something like that went from a hypothetical problem to a real one, at which point he would have had to shut it down just as painfully as Rosemary had with him. “But you were not my teacher. And I would _never_ buy a student’s nudes,” he rasped out, wanting to argue the point.

Rosemary forced a wan smile onto her face. “But you can see the parallels, surely. The fact that I was buying your nudes made it worse. There was just... just this great gulf of power and experience between us, and it was incredibly wrong of me to encourage you the way that I did, and I am so, so sorry.”

Alexander stared down at her anguished face, trying to decide how he felt about this apology. “And now?” he asked, not really knowing what sort of answer he was hoping for.

Rosemary’s cheeks flushed that ruddy dark brown he remembered liking so well, and her eyes darted away from him. “Now... Now I...” And her teeth dug into her lower lip nervously, and he felt that urge to kiss her again.

He felt more certain of himself suddenly. “Are you seeing someone these days, Rosemary?” He managed, somehow, to keep his tone light and disinterested as he asked the question, and was rewarded by the sight of Rosemary’s face darkening further.

“No,” she muttered in the direction of the floor. “But you’re still a junior research assistant in a company where I’ve been established for the past decade, which doesn’t make it _any_ less inappropriate.”

“I am in a different department,” he said, taking a tiny step closer to her.

“And you’re a new graduate who still needs another five years or so to get yourself established in this field,” she said, flashing him a warning look as she took a tiny step back. “Come to me then, if you still want to.”

“One year,” he bartered, feeling a smile he could not suppress press at the corners of his mouth. He took another step forward and she another step back. “And of course I still want you.”

“Well haven’t you gotten _confident_. And four years,” she said, with a stubborn lift of her chin. “That’s my final offer.”

“Three,” he countered, and now he had her backed up against the door of her office. She was staring up at him, eyes very wide and her mouth hanging open, and he knew he was about to do something very stupid. “Perhaps two and a half if I am on my best behavior,” he whispered down at her. And then, very deliberately, he stooped over her and planted a kiss on that startled looking mouth of hers.

Her response was instantaneous, her arms coming up around his neck as she pulled him against her, kissing him like her life depended on it. Alexander had just enough presence of mind to turn the lock on her lab door before he was lost to her, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her body hard against his as he kissed her back, just as fervent, the five years since she had broken his heart melting away in an instant, taking all the pain she had caused with them.

After several long, quiet, desperate moments, punctuated only by the sounds of frantic kisses and the rustle of clothing, Alexander broke away to breathe, keeping his forehead pressed to Rosemary’s so that he could look her in the eye. Her own hot, panting breaths feathered across his lips as she looked back at him, studying him intently.

“That is _not_ your best behavior,” she said finally, with a breathless little laugh.

“Oh, it absolutely is,” he growled back before dropping a kiss to the tip of her nose. And then a renewed awareness of where they were made it through to his hormone-fogged brain. “Though perhaps not at work,” he added contritely.

“You could come cook me dinner some night this week,” Rosemary said, her eyes dropping to his chest as she unhooked her fingers from where she had slid them between the buttons of his shirt.

“I will bring condoms,” he said, grinning down at her.

“ _Alexander.”_ She tapped him firmly on the center of his chest as she glared up at him. “Don’t push your luck. I could still decide to be serious about those five years, you know.”

He placed his hand over hers, pressing her palm to his chest. “I have already waited five years for you. I will wait a decade, if I must.”

She ducked her head to one side, blushing once more. “ _Alexander_.”

He took shameless advantage and bent over her again, dropping heated kisses to her exposed neck. “Please do not make me wait a decade,” he growled against her skin.

“I won’t,” she promised breathlessly. “Only we really do need to stop doing this at _work_.”

Alexander laughed and released her, taking a reluctant step back. “How about dinner tonight?”

She nodded fervently. “Tonight. I’ll take you home.”

“To your apartment and not to drop me off at mine this time, I hope,” he teased, remembering that long-ago night when he had naively hoped that she was offering what was now a certainty between them.

Rosemary’s mortified expression as she obviously remembered the same night made him laugh once more.

This time, he would not let her chase him away.


	17. Chapter 17

Two years had gone by faster than Rosemary had ever imagined they could.

She would have resented it if she hadn’t been so happy.

But she _was_ happy. Happy every time she woke up beside Alexander, happy every time they spent an evening at home, cooking a meal together, happy even to fall asleep to the sound of his gentle snore.

And happy now, laying sweaty and replete in the middle of their bed, Alexander pressing lazy little kisses to her shoulder in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

There was a terrible thought. The fact that she sometimes called it that ridiculous word instead of thinking about it like the sex that it was.

“Thank goodness tomorrow’s a Saturday,” she murmured, stroking fingers across his bare scalp. “We can sleep in a little.”

He shivered under her touch. “Thought Al was coming over for your birthday lunch,” he murmured against her neck before pressing another kiss to the pulse point beneath her ear.

“But we aren’t doing that until one, which means we can sleep in until noon if we want.”

“You know that man always shows up early.”

“And he can wait in the hallway if he does.”

Alexander rested his head against her shoulder and let out a contented hum. “You know he will just sit out there and stage a protest by singing happy birthday at top of lungs.”

Rosemary laughed at that. “God, I love you,” she said. And then, before she could think better of it… “Want to get married?”

Alexander froze for a moment, his body stiffening against her side. And then he lifted his head from her shoulder so that he could look her in the face. “Do you?”

She studied him carefully, that long, familiar swoop of his nose, the smooth arches of his bare eyebrow ridges, the dramatic curves of his cheekbones. And she found she could not stop smiling. “Yes.”

A strange, wondering, _elated_ expression spread across Alexander’s face. “Then yes.”

The first person they told was, of course, Al.

“I’m assuming I’m the maid of honor,” he said first thing after congratulating them both.

“I was thinking we would just do a courthouse ceremony,” Rosemary said, exchanging a worried look with Alexander.

“Nonsense,” Al said, shaking his head. “You’ve got to give us all a chance to celebrate it with you.”

“What, and our preferences don’t matter?” she asked, sticking her tongue out at him.

“I’ve always wanted to help plan a wedding,” Al said, giving her a mournful look.

Rosemary exchanged another look with Alexander, who had a resigned expression on his face now. “We’ll talk about it.”

Alexander had been dubious about having an actual wedding, but Al’s obvious enthusiasm for the wedding planning had managed to sweep both him and Rosemary up in it as well. And now, he needed to find himself a best man.

There really was only one choice.

“So you’re getting hitched, huh?” Isabel grinned at him. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“And I never thought I would see the day that you stayed with one girlfriend for longer than six months, but here you and Renée are, breaking records.”

Isabel laughed and ducked her head to one side, clearly embarrassed. “Yeah, well. We were lucky to find each other.”

Isabel’s wife poked her head out of the door of her home office. “Did I hear my name?”

“We’re just gossiping about you, darling.”

Renée laughed. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” But before retreating to her office, she took the time to come over to the couch and bend over Isabel from behind, pressing a kiss to her neck that left Isabel blushing.

“Aaaanyway,” Isabel said squeakily, before clearing her throat. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I was wondering if you would like to be my best man,” Alexander said.

“Me?” Isabel gave him a startled look. “Not Viktor?”

“I told Viktor that Rosemary and I were getting married and the first thing out of his mouth was not congratulations, but a refusal to be my best man.”

“Really? Why?”

“Honestly? I think he is still terrified of Rosemary.” Alexander shrugged. “But I was planning to ask you first anyway.”

“I’m not sure…”

“You would get to plan my bachelor party.”

Isabel’s eyes lit up. “I’m in.”

“And I am suddenly terrified.”

“It’s too bad the Naughty Clowns dissolved after you left for your doctorate,” Isabel said, mock-contemplative, laughter in her voice.

Alexander rolled his eyes. “Please. The last thing I want at my bachelor party is clown strippers.”

“Dude, half your friends were part of that troupe. It’s going to be the elephant in the room, either way.”

“Too bad they broke up four years ago,” Alexander shot back with a warning glare.

“Yeah. Too bad.” But from Isabel’s gleeful expression as she said this, Alexander was already suspecting that he would live to regret asking her to be his best man.


	18. Chapter 18

“What are we doing here? I thought my bachelorette was tomorrow night.”

Al laughed. “Oh, you’ll see soon enough, Rosie.” And then he flung open the door to one of the event halls at the hotel she would be getting married at in two days and ushered her inside.

Rosemary looked around the event hall in disbelief. It was full of people—of clowns—in various states of undress, applying face paint to one another and chattering excitedly all the while. “Al. Darling, sweet Al. Please tell me you did _not_ hire clown strippers for my bachelorette.”

Al grinned wickedly. “Of course not, Rosie. The Naughty Clowns wouldn’t do a reunion performance for just _anyone_ , you know.” He leaned down close and whispered conspiratorially to her. “This is _Alexander’s_ bachelor party.” And then he held a tub of red greasepaint out to her. “So are you going to get all tarted up or what?”

Rosemary took the paint and gave Al a dubious look. “All right, who spilled the beans? Was it Isabel?”

“Eber, actually. Viktor tells his husband absolutely _everything_.”

“Of course it was Eber.” Rosemary rolled her eyes even as she struggled not to laugh. “So what’s going on, Al? Why am _I_ here?”

Al dropped the duffle bag he had been carrying on to a tabletop and started pulling out brightly-colored articles of clothing, explaining all the while, and Rosemary was hard-pressed not to hurt herself laughing as he did.

When Alexander arrived, the troupe at large descended on him in a howling, laughing mob, and he emerged fifteen minutes later looking discombobulated and dressed in his old costume, his face painted, the bright red clown nose attached to the tip of his own. Rosemary watched from halfway behind a pillar at the back of the room, along with several of his other non-clown friends, all of them daubed in greasepaint and wearing an assortment of costumes put together from the closets of the former members of Naughty Clown Burlesque. Even Al had been kitted out in an old costume, though only Mace had had an outfit big enough to fit him, and as Mace was a big, burly bear of a man—even compared to Al—it hung loose and ridiculous on his form.

As the actual clowns whirled Alexander around from one exhibition to another, as he joined in, trying to remember how to cartwheel and letting Mace toss him in the air for old time’s sake, all the rest of his friends slowly infiltrated the group, sneaking up around him. He noticed Isabel first and started laughing so hard it turned into a breathless wheeze. And then he caught sight of Al and fell over, he was laughing so hard.

All the while, Rosemary stayed hidden, waiting for her cue.

It came after they had gotten several drinks into Alexander and settled him in a chair on the dance floor set up in the middle of the room.

“I understand it’s tradition for the groomsmen to buy the bachelor a lap dance or two,” Mace said, his voice booming out over the chatter in the room. Everyone in the room went quiet as he continued, though a few people couldn’t quite keep their amused laughter in. “But as we’re already all ex-strippers here—“ he was briefly interrupted by several shouts of dismay from the non-stripper members of the audience “—we’ve brought in a special guest.”

Rosemary made her stealthy way up behind Alexander as Mace spoke, tiptoeing along as well as she was able to in the ridiculous shoes they’d put her in. If she had known this was going to happen ahead of time, she would have asked for the opportunity to practice.

Of course, if she had known this was going to happen ahead of time, she would have put the kibosh on the entire thing, which she supposed was why they hadn’t told her.

Alexander jumped as Rosemary draped herself over the back of his chair, wrapping her arms around his shoulders from behind. And then, in a soft, delighted exhale, he whispered her name. “Rosemary.”

“Apparently I’m Bubbles the clown for tonight,” she murmured against his ear.

“Oh, this I must see,” he said, tilting his head to the side to try and get a look at her.

“In a moment,” Rosemary murmured, running her hands down his chest.

Alexander shivered.

In the end, her lap dance was a hasty and awkward thing that ended with her sitting sideways on his lap, one arm around his shoulders. She only had to hope that she wasn’t squishing him too much. From the way the hard bar of his erection was pressing into her hip, she supposed that even if she were squishing him, he did not mind.

“I think I ought to drag you upstairs to the room Al reserved for us,” she murmured, hooking the fingers of both hands through one of his suspenders.

“Oh?” he asked breathlessly, his gaze fixed on her chest, which was trying its hardest to fall out of a polka-dotted halter top that almost fit her.

“Either that, or I’m going to have to drag you into a closet for a quickie.”

“ _Rosemary_.” The look he gave her was half-amused, half appalled.

“What? You’re the one with a hard-on. And anyway, I missed the nose.” She punctuated this statement with a tap to the center of said appendage.

“You did _not_.” But a little smirk had turned up one corner of his mouth, and he let her pull him upright and drag him out of the event hall, followed by the hoots and hollers of all of his friends.

Alexander was grateful that his friends had gotten the urge to embarrass him out of the way before the wedding. Though that bachelor party had not, in retrospect, been as embarrassing as he had expected. If nothing else, it had proven once and for all that Rosemary really did not care about that part of his past.

Not that he had any doubts on that score any more. Not after more than two years in her bed and by her side. Not now that they were getting married.

But he found it strangely reassuring, all the same.

Alexander shifted and tugged at the neck of his tux, looking over the crowded room, at their friends all seated in rows, waiting for the bride to appear. At his side, Isabel nudged him with her elbow. “Calm down,” she said, her voice full of a low humor. “She’s here. I saw her five minutes ago.”

“I know. I just…” He had never expected this, not really. Had never thought that Rosemary would be the sort for marriage until the moment she had asked him if he wanted to marry her. Had never really thought that he was the sort for marriage either, until that moment she had asked him. But once she had, it had fallen into place like the most natural thing in the world.

Before he could figure out what he wanted to say to Isabel, the processional started up and the big doors at the end of the room opened, revealing Rosemary in her wedding dress—a gorgeous gold concoction because she had protested wearing white—looking ridiculously short next to Al, who paced her slowly up the aisle.

Alexander was grateful that they had bullied Al into letting them have a very simple ceremony. A matter of twenty minutes, and they were married, the register signed and witnessed.

And then it was time for the party.

The toasts over dinner were not as embarrassing as they could have been, and they managed to skip most of the dances that had become a traditional part of the American wedding—Rosemary’s mother was too frail to do much more than scoot along behind her walker, and Rosemary’s father had been dead for almost as long as Alexander’s own parents—but during planning, Al and Isabel had managed to bully them into a first dance together, pointing out that this was part of the whole ceremony of the thing, and as much for their friends as it was for them.

And, as Alexander pulled Rosemary on to the dance floor, maneuvering her around in a simple waltz that sent the full skirt of her wedding dress swinging, he could not help but feel the romance of it.

“How are you holding up?” he asked, smiling down at her.

She beamed up at him. “Perfectly, as long as I’m with you.” And then she made a little face. “And much, much better, now that the morning sickness has stopped,” she added in a low voice, only audible to him. “Thank goodness my mother was right about month three!”

Alexander pulled Rosemary a little closer in their dance and bent down to whisper in her ear. “Do you think that we should tell everyone the good news while they are all in one place?”

Rosemary let out a snort of laughter. “I think I want another month or two before Al starts ragging me mercilessly about incubating a baby clown,” she murmured back.

“You are already starting to show, Rosemary. I do not think we can keep it quiet for _that_ long.” He lifted his head and smiled down at her. “And I imagine he figured it out when you could not drink at your own bachelorette party.”

Rosemary’s only response was to slide her arms further up around his shoulders and pull him into a kiss as they slowly swayed to a halt in the middle of the dance floor.

He did not know what was ahead of them, but he knew that whatever path their lives took, no matter how ridiculous it might be, they would walk it together.

And he could not help but be excited by the prospect.


	19. Art gallery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm going through and adding galleries of art for most of the things I've written, since there's a lot of it over on my Tumblr and it is all poorly organized.
> 
> I'm making this gallery just part of the fic itself because, well... bad enough I wrote a clown stripper AU, let's not multiply the problem.
> 
> Also includes some of the further adventures of Clown!Baby, who is still fetal at the end of the fic.

  
Alexander being asked by a woman in a gold dress to give the birthday boy a lap dance (from chapter 1).  
  


  
Rosemary in her "Your Daughter Calls Me Daddy Too" t-shirt, as mentioned in chapter 5.  
  


  
Rosemary gets a lapdance from Tiny the Clown, in chapter 8.  
  


  
A sketchy little comic of Rosemary's reaction to seeing Alexander's un-clown-painted face for the first time in Chapter 10.  
  


  
Rosemary getting ready to give Alexander a lap dance at his bachelor party in Chapter 18.  
  


  
Al takes his duties as Clown!Baby's honorary uncle very seriously. (Clown!Baby looks very cute in clown onesies, which is good, because everyone from Alexander's clown troupe gave him a pile of clown onesies too.)  
  


  
A moment in the everyday life of these two as millennial parents, which really, honestly, is an extremely cursed concept.  
  


  
A fully grown Clown!Baby, who has just decided to fully embrace their clown heritage because they know that anyone they bring home to meet their parents is going to eventually see thousands of photos of them in a clown onesie.


End file.
